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Comment by ino | Hacker News Reader

Start using the keyboard trackpad for moving the cursor, selecting and deleting words, paragraphs or the whole text input. It's the killer app.

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Pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean by "keyboard trackpad"? Is this on iOS or what?

Edit: HOLY WHAT!?! How did I not know that this exists?!?! I just figured it out. If you didn't know what it is, like me, then pull up any place where you can input text. Type something in and then Force Touch anywhere on the keyboard while it's showing. Your cursor will move with your finger like a trackpad. That's amazing.

I'd like to take the opportunity to point out that when people talk about how mobile touch interfaces have "low discoverability", comments like this are exactly what they're talking about.

But it should also be noted there's a difference of importance between the discoverability for basic functions, like opening apps or moving the cursor 'regularly' in a text field. Then you have the discoverability of the shortcuts, or 'power user' features which you can do without

Of course, this is all on a grade. Control Centre has a medium-low discoverability (given only a visual hint on the lock screen), and is more vital to the iPhone. The 3D Touch cursor movement is a lot less necessary (I know about it but never use it), and is a lot less discoverable. The 3D Touch-from-edge-of-screen-to-switch-between-apps gesture is there as well, but make slightly more discoverable as its easier to accidentally trigger it to learn about it for the first time.

An aside, I actually find the 'advanced' cursor movement, in both the 3D Touch form on iPhone 6s Plus and in the long-press form on the iPad Pro, to be next to impossible to use. I can never reliably figure out what triggers the different modes of it (cursor movement, text selection, etc) and thus barely ever use it.

Deep pressing on the keyboard triggers a cursor movement (keep pressed to continue moving the cursor). Press deeper to toggle cursor selection.

DAMN IT. I knew about the cursor movement but not about the selection!

This keyboard movement business is far from less necessary -- moving a cursor in text the traditional way, with that wonky magnifying glass and terrible snapping precision, can be borderline infuriating.

They could pop up a suggestion/tutorial the first time a user tries to refine a selection repeatedly?

Something would be nice.

Pop-up tutorials always make me feel somewhat intruded on and break the transparent assimilation between me and the tech; being reminded you don't completely control this thing in your hand (or on your monitor -- websites fall in the same boat) dampens my trust of a tool.

Maybe including it in tutorials in the system app. But, yeah something would be nice.

http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

Wow. +1 for having no idea I could do that. So much easier than the old way of trying to hunt and peck the right spot with the magnifying glass.

You can do the same thing on iPad using 2 fingers.

Test

This isn't even the end of it. Just to clarify, besides moving it like on a trackpad, you can force touch the "keyboard" while still holding down your finger, and it'll select the word underneath. Force touch again and everything will be deselected. All while you're still in the "trackpad mode".

I know, HOLY! As soon as I received my 6s I started pressing on everything and found this amazing feature. People bag on 6s force touch but I use it often and I'm a happy messenger for it.

Unfortunately the keyboard force touch only works about ~70% of the time, which is too unpredictable for me to start incorporating into regular use as a user.

It's odd that after ten years of development, Apple still hasn't made their keyboard just work. Selecting and manipulating text is still buggy and unpredictable.

Wait until the cursor stops blinking. Takes some tenths of a second after you stop typing. I was tearing out my hair until I read that.

I agree. I got really excited about the keyboard thing (when I edit code on my phone, proper cursor movement is severely lacking), but when I tried it on a friend's 6S I was severely underwhelmed. The activation force seemed random, and the cursor would never land where you expected. It was slower than using the little magnifying glass on the actual text.

Touch keyboards are a hard problem, but we use them so often (I'm using one now) that I think Apple would be smart to put some more thought into it.

That's an accurate assessment. I use the trackpad on my 6s+ frequently. 50% of the time it works perfectly. 50% of the time I apparently don't lift my finger in the speed or direction iOS expects, so the cursor moves forwards or backwards 1 or 2 characters from where I wanted it to stop. And I have to try again because there's no other way to nudge the cursor a character or two.

Just a little tweaking and it would be perfect. I don't have this problem with using the keyboard normally, which is quite accurate.

I just looked at the changelog for iOS 9.3 and it says:

> Improves reliability when using 3D Touch on the keyboard

Hopefully this means "just a little tweaking" was done and the feature is more comfortable to use.

On the subject of keyboards, I have always found the iOS keyboard to be the most satisfying to use, possibly also the most accurate. What do other people like using?

I liked the windows phone keyboard, thought the Fire phone was okay, but am chronically unsatisfied with the Android typing experience. I have played with a few but settled for a while on Google Keyboard before moving onto Fleksy which isn't bad. Shame its broken for HTML text input fields...

SwiftKey on Android is still by far the best for me, but unfortunately other problems with Android (namely the dearth of high-end devices under 5") are probably going to force me to switch to iPhone.

The default Apple keyboard makes me incredibly frustrated, especially when used one-handed (which is 90% of my usage). No flow typing, and nearly all numbers, punctuation, and symbols are locked away behind layers of menus. I do find it the most accurate for typing in unpredictable plain text, but that's not very useful even for passwords (LastPass + most of my passwords have symbols in them).

Most of the third party keyboards are crippled shadows of their Android counterparts, but I can least get flow typing through them.

> SwiftKey on Android is still by far the best for me, but unfortunately other problems with Android (namely the dearth of high-end devices under 5") are probably going to force me to switch to iPhone.

The Xperia Z Compact line is, for my money, the most pleasant Android phone I've found. The Z3C is still plenty snappy and is my personal favorite, but after sacrificing mine to the pavement deities the Z5C is still pretty great.

You can access the second mode of the keyboard by tapping on the "123" icon, dragging your thumb over to the key you want to select, then lifting. This also works with capitalization + shift and international keyboards.

There are a few gotchas that you have to learn which come with practice and it really pays off.

There's a delay for how quickly you can use it after the last time you've used it. The delay could/should be smaller, but don't get frustrated. Go slow and don't press too hard.

When you get used to the timings and pressures, it pays off and it's suddenly a pleasure to go and delete or correct something, or the whole input. Now I get frustrated on phones without it.

I went through a period of thinking the same: sometimes it would seem to want to type a letter instead of triggering the cursor movement. I think the key is that you just keep your finger on the screen while applying a bit more pressure (press harder, then release the pressure without lifting off the screen) to trigger the trackpad mode. I now find it 100% reliable and can't figure out how to trigger the odd behaviour I was previously experiencing.

If you try to use the force-touch "trackpad" too soon after you've typed a character, the keyboard thinks you're still typing and refuses to do it. You have to pause for a bit or tap somewhere outside of the keyboard then try to force-touch. At least, that has been my experience. It's incredibly frustrating because I almost always want to use it to correct something in the word I just typed.

I have the same problem with the dictation icon. Sometimes I'll start typing a message and then realize that I'd rather dictate it. Once you start typing, the keyboard goes into "typing" mode. If you try to tap the dictation icon, it thinks you're aiming for the space bar.

I think that the keyboard is trying to be "smart" by altering its behavior based on what it thinks you'll do next. The problem is that those changes aren't reflected in the UI, so there's no way for me to know about them. I'm sure I benefit from that intelligence some of the time, but I only notice it when it when the keyboard stubbornly refuses to do what I want.

If you ever find yourself trying to activate the keyboard cursor but the phone thinks you're typing, simply let off on the pressure a little (without removing your finger from the screen) and then press down again. This will switch you into cursor mode. I've found this to be 100% reliable.

wow, this works.

The 3d touch 'trackpad' thing on the keyboard is great, but i could never get it to reliabily work... but i think using this (slight push, then harder again) makes it almost completely usable.

I don't have a 6s but I think you could tweak a little bit in the Keyboard settings under _Accessibility_.

It works every time. Just wait for the cursor to start blinking and then deep press. It takes a while to get used to but then it just works.

It's not odd at all. PEBKAC is tough to solve with the constraints of a mobile device.

Well, I forget to use it on the keyboard too. :)

And the keyboard has exactly the same problem; force-touch uses space that already has a purpose and a gesture that is somewhat similar to that of the normal keyboard function. I tried it just now and there is a decent chance I will start typing random characters instead of activating it. That, to me, is a failure of an interface. I will admit that once activated correctly, the mini-trackpad is a better method for moving the cursor (although, almost anything could improve over the default text editing on iOS).

Yeah, kb trackpad is pretty much the only thing I knowingly use 3D Touch for. I randomly discovered it months ago, thought it was some confusing but at first, then realized what I'd done. The accuracy has always been slightly disappointing, though. As well as a few other little quirks, like losing its place in long text, getting stuck at the top/bottom without scrolling upward/downward, etc. but overall, pretty handy.

This app also exists for all jail broken users. A swipe over the keyboard controls the cursor, and can select, move, erase, etc. Very smooth and natural.

It's not the killer app. Blackberry devices (e.g. Passport) have had this for ages.

(Not a problem that Apple's copying tech, it's just not unique)

If by ages you mean a little over a year, then yes. But just because another device had it first doesn't mean it's not the killer app for 3D touch.

Sorry I thought you meant that 3D touch made the keyboard selection the killer app for the iPhone platform.

It seems like a year and a half is a long time in mobile phone tech. Google apps have already said that the browser that Blackberry is out of date (which speaks about both the release cycle of Blackberry for a newish phone and Google).

Either way, the touch interface is very cool on Blackberry.

wow nice! I was only aware of the call button (useless 3 contact shortcut) and app store instant search. this is almost like a Easter egg.

As a person writing a lot of non-english text, I hate this feature with a passion because I constantly trigger it by accident when I'm trying to press-and-hold over a key to get to an alternate letter with some diacritics on it.

With my muscle memory, I end up marking parts of the text and overwriting it afterwards instead of inserting that one letter with the diacritics.

I just wish this worked on third party keyboards, I can't force myself off Swiftkey to Apple's keyboard at all.

The keyboard trackpad almost always lands me off by one character however. Something about releasing pressure changes how my finger contacts the screen. I love the idea, but I usually end up needing to do the long press after trying and failing 3 times to position my cursor where I want it.

For me and my stubby wildly uncontrollable fingers, this is worth the upgrade to the 6S almost all by itself. I use this multiple times a day and it's beautiful.

(I do use 3DTouch shortcuts as well and they probably save me a whole bunch of minutes over an entire day.)

It's a nice feature. However, I found it's hard to get it right to use kb as a mouse with 3D touch. Sometimes it just wont' register no matter how hard and fast I press down. Very frustrating.

Apple, are you listening?

It's nice, but it could've been done in software. In fact I've used that on my iPhones since probably 2013/2014.

holy shit

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