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Comment by KMnO4 | Hacker News Reader

When the iPhone first launched, it had to pull a lot of weight to convince people that a touchscreen keyboard could work as well as physical keys. One of the tricks it used was to predict the next letter and invisibly adjust the hitbox of each key.

If you type “h” and then hit the space between “w” and “e”, it will assume you wanted “e” and register that.

This could easily be implemented by dynamically adjusting the ranges where a letter can be selected from the joystick. You don’t even need to render it differently; just adjust which letter registers at a particular angle.

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That's cool, I haven't heard of this idea before. There's a lot of prediction magic possibility in many places. For example I've tried the swift key keyboard on Android for comparison with the Google one and it's so bad at swiping. Somehow gboard can guess almost every single word correctly, but swiftkey chose the wrong one almost every time. (I stuck with it for a month to make sure it's not just my familiarity)

A designer I work with also recommended this approach.

I also think word prediction could go a long way towards speeding it up further.

After 18 years of iPhone I still can not type on my iPhone. My average is literally 3 corrections PER WORD! It's super infuriating >:(

I must have fat fingers or some perception that means however it was tuned doesn't fit me. The most two most frustrating keys, period ('.') to the right of the spacebar which I seem to press by accident when I'm trying to add a space, 3 of 4 times. I don't think my finger is near it but a period appears so.I.often.type.like.this . Maybe this is the invisible button size increase. The other is delete next to 'm'. I also hit that 4 of 5 times when I didn't mean to. I wanted to screen capture my phone experience and post it as just how band the experience is but if course I'm mostly typing private stuff.

I'd think just from every day usage of 18 years I'd some how get it but it's been 18 years and I don't

Wow. Both of these things happen to me all the time, and somehow exactly as you’ve described.

It won’t be just one space that’s been replaced with “.”s but several in a row.

The trailing “m” is something I often hit as I do the double “ “ to get the “.” and then backspace over the final space but often hit the “m” and tap “send”/“submit” without reviewing.

Speaking of which, it would be nice if it could trim the last trailing “ “ when leaving focus of the text entry if it had been entered due to a doubled “ “ to obtain a “.”.

Can confirm the . thing happens to me also half.of.my.google.searches.are.like.this so I have even learned to be cautious that the last word does not look like a tld :)

I read somewhere that this happens primarily in a browser address bar, because they've tuned the keyboard in that context to strongly prefer dots over spaces. I'm not sure if that's true but I have also found that it happens to me the most when doing multi-word Google searches from the address bar, and not anywhere else.

Also, I used a couple alternative keyboards a few years back, but I have found that some point some iOS update within the last few years made the stock keyboard the best for me. When I type on the gBoard on my wife's phone it might as well be dvorak, everything comes out gibberish.

Let me add, I clearly see people around me who manage to type super fast so clearly it works for some. Maybe I need a class on how to type on iPhone :P

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