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Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little surprised that Apple included custom keyboards. They've always been an "our way or the highway" company, and custom keyboards seem like a very geek-specific feature, even if they are better to type on. Not that I'm complaining! I can finally build a couple of new apps that I wasn't able to before. :)

(If anyone is interested, I'm working on a clone of the existing Apple keyboard for use as a base for developing 3rd party keyboards: https://github.com/archagon/tasty-imitation-keyboard)

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Apple has had a very long history of absorbing user hacks/extensions into its OS. Pre OSX there were lots if extensions that were bought out or blatantly ripped off that made it into the core of the OS. I'm a bit surprised it's taken them so long on this. I'm a bit surprised that some of the features of XtraFinder haven't been absorbed. Auto adjusting finder column widths are a huge pluses for me

See also: the Quicksilver/Launchbar/Alfred ideas that are being folded into Spotlight in Yosemite.

The big surprise is not that iOS8 is getting Swype, but that they are opening the APIs up for arbitrary third-party keyboards (albeit heavily curated, I'm sure).

They've always been an "our way or the highway" company

Under Tim Cook I'm not sure that maxim will apply to design any more, it certainly didn't apply to software/hardware in the 90's pre-jobs. Perhaps Cook will still apply it to services like apple pay where it helps them lock in profits and customers, just like most other corporations.

I don't think Apple objects to geeky features in general--OS X ships with a pretty robust CLI and it doesn't get much geekier than that.

I think they just want to first make sure that the default user interface is totally solid and easy to use, and that the geeky stuff will not harm that. That way geeks can opt into power user stuff, but regular users don't even have to know it's there.

iOS has seen a steady progression of power-user functionality: SDK, cut/copy/paste, app switching, detailed notifications settings, cloud storage and syncing, etc. But if you go back to the original iPhone UI, the basics will still work that way in iOS 8.

Good to know that you feel a BSD UNIX variant is "pretty robust" ;-)

Well I didn't want to oversell it. :-)

Seems like every time someone compliments the OS X Terminal, someone else pipes up with a list of commands and utilities it's missing or several versions back on, compared to a Linux distro.

Homebrew has pretty much solved that problem for me, and iTerm 2 is pretty spiffy.

I'm not super hardcore about shells or whatever though so I probably don't get exposed to many of those issues.

I do get the feeling that Apple is trying to take the approach of the Ubuntu LTS series and be fairly conservative on what they're including in the OS.

Someone designing an old-school iOS6 keyboard might find a lot of interest - some folks I know still haven't warmed to the iOS7+ keyboard.

Hmm! That's not a bad idea, actually. Once I finish with my project, should be a fairly simple graphics swap and metrics adjustment. :)

It might be geek specific for us/European customers, but my impression in China and japan is that most people use 3rd keyboards. In china all my Mac friends even used 3rd party keys on OSX!

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