![]() ![]() It’s as responsive as typing on a MacBook, and as a benefit it lets you use many of the traditional keyboard shortcuts: you can jump around to words using option and the arrow keys, or to the beginning or end of lines using command and the arrow keys. Using a hardware keyboard with the iPad-and I speak here having only used Apple’s Bluetooth wireless keyboard-is a joy. In true Jobsian fashion, at least part of that was true. But it’s strangely reminiscent of a comment Steve Jobs made at the 2003 All Things Digital conference when he said that Apple had no plans to make a tablet because it turned out that people wanted keyboards. Still, it’s an odd decision for Apple, which eschewed hardware keyboards publicly and vehemently with the iPhone. If the iPad was ever going to be a useful work tool for me, support for hardware keyboards was a must. The muscle memory is so strong that I don’t have to look at either the keyboard or the screen to know what words I’m typing. Despite the layer of abstraction that a keyboard might put between you and your words, years of usage has made that abstraction fade into the background. I’m not ashamed to say that my cheer was among the loudest. The iPad would not only have a dock with a hardware keyboard but would also add support for Bluetooth keyboard. There were cheers in January when Apple announced that Occasionally that comes in useful, especially since the “shake to undo” feature, though present, is a bit unwieldy on the iPad. The second set of keys that you bring up by tapping the “.?123” button in the lower left corner is similar in most respects to the iPhone’s keyboard, with the addition of an Undo button. It’s not terribly useful if you need to type a lot of accented characters, but if you’re writing in another language, you’d probably want to switch to one of the iPad’s many other keyboard layouts anyway. Besides the punctuation marks, for example, you can tap and hold on “e” and you’ll get the option to type é, è, ë, ê, and more. (You can also tap and hold the comma key for the apostrophe, or an inverted exclamation point, or a semi-colon.) That tip, first pointed out to meīy Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser on Twitter, has been a godsend.Īs with the iPhone’s keyboard, you can access many special characters, such as accented letters, by tapping and holding on a base key. While many have knocked the absence of the apostrophe on the first screen, Apple’s also included a handy trick here: quickly swipe upwards on the comma key and it’ll automatically type an apostrophe. For one thing, you can now type a period, a comma, an exclamation point, or a question mark without leaving the “letters” screen. However, Apple has also made some welcome improvements to the iPad’s keyboard from the iPhone’s. On the iPhone, it’s always resided in the bottom right. If you’ve gotten used to typing on the iPhone, then the one difference that will probably bug you the most is that Apple has moved the delete key back into the space it normally occupies on a hardware keyboard, the top right. I also miss having number keys on the same screen as letters, since having to toggle back and forth to access those and many punctuation marks is definitely a time-suck. My left pinky longs for the full-sized Shift key that you find on a physical keyboard the iPad’s is merely the same as the letter keys. ![]() I also find the iPad’s keyboard layout annoying. For whatever reason, the glass of the iPad screen has a sort of tactile illusion that makes it feel to me like there’s a little bit of give-just enough to not make my fingertips feel like I’m just drumming them on a tabletop. But here we also encounter a problem that Apple cleverly solved on the iPhone with those little pop-ups that appear when you touch a key-on the iPad, your fingers cover the keys when you’re typing, sometimes making it tough to tell which ones you’re hitting.įrom an ergonomic standpoint, typing on a hard, unyielding surface doesn’t bother me nearly as much as I thought it would. That said, the difficulty is somewhat neutralized by the fact that you’re usually looking at the iPad’s screen-where the keyboard is located-anyway. The lack of tactile cues for discerning keys definitely is an annoyance for touch typing. It feels somewhat awkward at first, but it’s possible to get a surprising amount of speed in this manner without having to worry about the cramped size of the keyboard. ![]() And, if you don’t have a handy surface to rest the iPad on, I’ve had good luck with holding the iPad in one hand and typing with all five fingers of the other hand. ![]() While typing in the iPad’s landscape mode on a flat surface is doable, I’ve found that having a slight incline, such as that provided by Apple’s iPad case, is preferable: it makes both typing and reading easier. ![]()
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