Keyboard Annoyances

I am really not sure what the thought process of Apple was here… and I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this.

But it seems (and this is a FEATURE) that if you type a character and double tap the spacebar (ie. you want to type TWO spaces), ios inserts a “.” and a space!
if you type “slower” it works fine, and for the app I’m designing, I need what the user actually typed… since periods have MEANING.

And there seems to be no way to turn this off… supposedly there is a “setting” but I can’t find it ("." shortcut doesn’t seem to do it)

This, and the 4 second backspace “feature”… .wonder what other things I’m going to stumble over

Assuming you’re serious, it’s been a feature forever. (And I mean literally, in iPhone terms, quite possibly ever.)

General - Keyboard, has the setting.

Quite serious… that is a STUPID feature… if it were HTML and it inserted “nbsp;” that might make sense… but otherwise I don’t see the purpose… And as to “forever” , perhaps so, but I dont’ “USE” an iPhone… its a means to an end… I have an iPad and iTouch strictly for software testing… So I rarely do much “typing” on one.

where?.. as I said… “.” Shortcut doesn’t seem to do it, and I don’t see anything else that might be it

[quote=387980:@Dave S]
Quite serious… that is a STUPID feature… if it were HTML and it inserted “nbsp;” that might make sense… but otherwise I don’t see the purpose[/quote]
It makes texting your friends faster. You act like everything new is awful, but you’re stuck in the past. Nobody uses straight capitals for emphasis, that’s yelling at people. It’s literally a documented thing. Stop yelling at us.

Look through the options, not the shortcuts. If you slow down and read, you’ll find it.

I’d have to add that this is probably not the solution you’re looking for. If you’re trying to emulate an old input device, as you can’t just tell users "Oh hey, go modify a system setting for this one app. I would wager it’s possible to turn it off on the text area because there are already several code editors available.

Its stupid in the fact that if you need to type something like a note, a book , you don’t want extra stuff magically appearing

And the OPTION is called ["." Shortcut] it is the only OPTION that refers to a PERIOD, and turning it off has no effect
its at the bottom of the “GENERAL -> KEYBOARD” screen, but again… no effect

And yeah, I’m creating something that requires “old school” typing… and of course I can’t tell the user to turn something on/off just for this one app… but for the record, I have spent the better part of the day searching for a solution. The only “solution” anyone posted is to not allow sequential spaces at all… which of course is also not an option

Just tested the correct setting with Gavin, so it’s a PEBCAK. You know what else is really funny, you’re insisting periods have meaning, but totally ignoring that caps have meaning.

That’s all until you stop yelling.

[quote=387983:@Dave S]And the OPTION is called [“.” Shortcut] it is the only OPTION that refers to a PERIOD, and turning it off has no effect
its at the bottom of the “GENERAL → KEYBOARD” screen, but again… no effect[/quote]

That’s exactly the right setting. And turning it off does make my iPhone insert two spaces instead of adding a period. I’ve seen some people try to “slide” a switch in iOS to toggle between on and off. Just tap it. If you try to slide before lifting, it is too easy to be like a mouse click where you move off the button before the mouse up.

Personally I prefer to leave the option on. I’ve always liked the feature myself, especially since the default character keyboard view does not have room for a period (unless using an iPad). Ironically, I’ve always found it an intuitive method precisely because:

And as one who personally learned touch typing using old manual typewriters over 45 years ago, the standard at the time was to always put two spaces between sentences. (Some will argue that is more readable when using fixed pitch fonts, which of course manual typewriters were at the time. See also this recent study.) So when typing I’ve always used two spaces making this option very natural to me. I just don’t type the period (since not available on the default view anyway) but I still get the period.

And it doesn’t very often otherwise interfere, despite the Chicago Manual of Style not liking it.

the problem is, what the user is typing is not “sentences”, there are no need for “periods”, and “.” would be considered a “decimal” point. So if they were to type

and worse, attempting to type a quoted string with spaces results in the same “wrong” data
the problem is, there is no point in the internal process flow where one can identify this event… the individual keystrokes are correct, but iOS changes the previous entered space to the “.” before adding the 2nd space the user typed.

So, I will rescind my “stupid” description, as I can see it as a fast way to end the punctuation of a sentence… just too bad that there isn’t a programmatic option to suspend that “feature” during a specific app

I agree that it would be good to be able to suspend the feature in code, but alas. The traditional workaround in Obj-C/Swift has simply been to check the user’s input in the delegate of the textview, and replace where necessary. Kind of nasty, but works.

Haven’t tried it in Xojo and not on my Mac right now, but don’t see why it’s not possible.

As you previously noted, users can avoid the period substitution by pausing between the two spaces. But granted, I’d hazard a guess not very many iOS users are aware of that capability.

Since you stated you don’t “use” any iOS device other than for testing but have both an iPad and iPod Touch, I’ll go out on a limb here and take a SWAG that you have typed on your iPad more often then your iPod Touch. On the narrower iOS devices – which predate the wider tablets – this was considered such a useful shortcut that it has its own entry under General > Keyboard instead of just being a default entry in Keyboards > Text Replacement.

Understand too that if users have created personal shortcuts in Settings > General > Text Replacement and then happen to type one of those in your field, it too would be substituted.

I’m one who “uses” an iPhone. I’m typing on it a lot (unless I just dictate to Siri). I love this feature and have actually wished for a something like a triple space to insert “?”.
I am interested, however, in whether it’s possible to package a custom keyboard in an app and programmatically enable it based on which field the user is typing in. Has anybody done something like this?

Then you may want to create a shortcut yourself in Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacement, however you are not allowed to use a space in a shortcut but you could do something like map qq to a question mark. I doubt that a double q would interfere much with normal typing but is still very fast to type from the alpha only keyboard.

Remember though too that you can just press on the shift key then slide over to the question mark and let up to quickly enter a question mark and return to the alpha keyboard. (You can do the same with digits etc, which is great when typing passwords)

My all time favorite enhancement to the keyboard got added with force touch – so does not apply to all devices. But for those with force touch, if you force touch the keyboard it turns into a trackpad where you can very easily and accurately move the insertion point where you want to edit text. It is WAY easier (to me) than moving the bubble. Especially when you want to move vertically.

Perhaps my biggest gripe with iOS is how many things are NOT easily discoverable. Work great once you know about them but you can use a device for a long time and never know what you are missing.

I actually tried that but the problem is that it’ll insert a space so you end up with “testqq” => “test ?”

[quote=388220:@Douglas Handy]Remember though too that you can just press on the shift key then slide over to the question mark and let up to quickly enter a question mark and return to the alpha keyboard. (You can do the same with digits etc, which is great when typing passwords)
[/quote]

I didn’t realize that!!! That is truly a life saver for me since I have a number of keyboards installed and cycling through is no fun (I usually press and hold the globe to reselect my qwerty keyboard). Thanks a billion!

I do still have a question regarding setting a keyboard based on which field a user is typing. I’m not talking about keyboard ‘types’, but about custom keyboards. Perhaps a keyboard for another language. I have mixture of “normal” and IPA (international phonetica alphabet) fields and manually switching the keyboard input makes for a bad UX.

Hmm, guess I should have tried it in an actual sentence. I setup qq and saw it would add a space afterward, which I figured would be OK for a question mark. Didn’t try it in actual normal usage though. Sorry.

But the ability to just temporarily change keyboard layouts by pressing and sliding is a real time-saver once you are used to it. As is using force touch to move the insertion point.

Regarding changing custom keyboards depending on the field, I assume you mean as a developer instead of a user. Even so, I’m not aware of a way to do more than change the keyboard “type”. Doesn’t mean it isn’t possible; just that I have never gone down that road. Most of my needs can be covered by using a toolbar to add a few limited options.