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Comment by julienchastang | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I agree with the notion that the iPad is good solely for content consumption. If you ever have to write in a foreign language, you will note that it is much easier to write on the iPad thanks to terrific internationalization support in the form of language specific auto-correct and virtual keyboards that do things normal keyboards can't (like pressing on a key for a second and getting several accented characters). I have always wanted to write an APL interpreter for iPad because dealing with the APL glyphs on the iPad keyboard would theoretically workout nicely. I have not tried texpad, but their use of customizable virtual keyboards certainly looks promising.

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> If you ever have to write in a foreign language, you will note that it is much easier to write on the iPad thanks to terrific internationalization support in the form of language specific auto-correct and virtual keyboards that do things normal keyboards can't (like pressing on a key for a second and getting several accented characters).

Language-specific autocorrect is common in desktop software that has autocorrect at all (e.g., wordprocessors) and, similarly, good access to international characters through methods faster than press-and-hold is pretty common in lots of desktop software.

Press-and-hold is a slow, clumsy approach that's only tolerable with a virtual keyboard because virtual keyboards are already so slow and clumsy that its not a big marginal cost.

Press and hold is slow, but the visual feedback is immensely useful.

I find myself using the Character Map (or Keyboard Viewer) all the time, because the keystrokes required aren't intuitive, and aren't labelled on my physical keyboard.

So for some users, press-and-hold on "e" to get é is far more efficient than having to open up a separate application entirely.

For that matter, I really like OS X's approach where you can use either input method.

Likewise, you can always switch to the specific language's keyboard on iOS, and press and hold is similarly obviated.

> I find myself using the Character Map (or Keyboard Viewer) all the time, because the keystrokes required aren't intuitive, and aren't labelled on my physical keyboard.

I don't know, I've always found the Word keystrokes intuitive (in fact that I was able to discover most of the ones I needed for French and Spanish by learning one and generalizing from there), and my main frustration in that regard is that they aren't standardized for text input in Windows.

As for labelled -- if I have to look at my keyboard to type, that's too much of an efficiency killer to start with.

> Likewise, you can always switch to the specific language's keyboard on iOS, and press and hold is similarly obviated.

Except that its generally not; even with the Spanish keyboard, you still need press-and-hold to get to the vowel accents.

You're correct. It's not ONLY good for consumption, it's just a low-fidelity, low-bandwidth input device. Touch does have the advantage of feeling natural, so that probably lends itself to a better input device in specific scenarios. Still, I can't help but pine for a future iPad on which I can use a pen. Whoa!

> virtual keyboards that do things normal keyboards can't (like pressing on a key for a second and getting several accented characters).

Can't, or don't? Repeating keys isn't all that useful, and a different behavior could certainly be implemented in software.

OS X actually does this now. You get a little pop-up when you hold down e(èéêëēėę) for example and press a number to choose. It's efficient enough if you don't type them often enough to remember the alternate keystrokes. (option something something)

It actually doesn't work well in TeX because it depends on having the correct input encoding set, which still breaks when you have multiple collaborators. Though \:e for ë is pretty easy to remember.

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