[awolf]

Typing is such a widely voiced complaint because it's new and difficult at first and requires practice. Instead of putting in the effort, almost everyone assumes the virtual keyboard paradigm is broken and simply throws their hands up in the air in frustration. It baffles me.

Typing on the iPad virtual keyboard is fine. Just like when you were learning to type on a physical keyboard, it takes practice up front. I can easily type 50 WPM on the virtual keyboard, and I'm not alone. See also: my app TapTyping.

[taude]

After two years, I disagree with this. I have to consistently concentrate on the physical act of typing and not what I'm trying to write.

[awolf]

Then you're doing it wrong.

Either you don't use proper typing style on a physical keyboard (all 10 fingers, each responsible for a specific set of keys), or you haven't put the effort into adapting that typing style for virtual keyboards.

Typing is about training your muscle memory for each finger for each keystroke it could possible be responsible for. Once your muscle memory is trained, it becomes a subconscious skill that you should not need to concentrate on.

The fact that this muscle memory is being used on a virtual keyboard vs. a physical keyboard does not matter whatsoever. The same concept applies.

Edit: email me [e-mail] and I'll give you a free download for my paid typing trainer app. It works.

[turtle4]

Your response accounts only for one piece of the experience, which is the muscle memory. Perhaps you move like a robot, and muscle memory is enough for you to precisely strike the small tap targets of a keyboard, but you are off target to tell someone they are wrong based solely on that.

Tactile feedback is a big advantage to physical typing which allows you to know your fingers are in the right place prior to making a keystroke. Without it, you don't know until after the touch has registered. Ignoring that and saying it amounts to nothing is short sighted at best. Even beyond that, there are plenty of people who aren't that coordinated and/or stable, period, which amplifies this deficiency.

Additionally, this doesn't account for the fact that in most scenarios, the person using a mobile device is, in fact, mobile, and may not have a flat, stable area to place the device, but rather they are balancing it on their lap or holding it with one hand and typing with the other. Nor does it capture the fact that when you have the device in your lap, the screen isn't going to be at an ideal angle to view at the same time.

So sure, the same concept applies, but to pretend that the experience isn't inferior is just turning a blind eye to reality, imho.

[awolf]

I agree that tactile feedback is an advantage to physical typing. I'm not ignoring that aspect when I say that virtual keyboard typing is fine. Virtual keyboard typing is not as fast as physical keyboard typing. I type 80 WPM on a physical keyboard and 50 WPM on my iPad. It's slower... but fine.

My response to taude still stands. If you constantly need to concentrate on the act of typing then you need to train your muscle memory.

[rogerchucker]

Or buy a Macbook Air.

[taude]

Big fan of the MBA.

[abhiv]

For me, the hard part about typing on a virtual keyboard is not hitting the keys, which are big enough on an iPad. It's switching to the non-standard keys like - or _, typing numbers, or even typing capital letters. Each of these requires one or more presses on a mode switch key, which changes all or most of the keys displayed, and then selecting the key to enter. Even for capital letters, you can't just press down Shift and then the key as you could on a normal keyboard. (You could rely on autocorrect if you need the capitalization at the start of a sentence, of course.)

Entering something like _ is especially poor because it requires two keypresses to get the keyboard into the right mode. So entering even a small bit of code on an iPad is painful if you use underscores in variable names.

Quite apart from the tactile feedback, I think mode switching is very disruptive to getting into the flow of typing -- "where did all my keys go?"

[rogerchucker]

IMHO, typing on iPad is stupid not necessarily because of the typing experience (I'm actually not terrible at it), but because the screen size above the virtual keyboard is too little. I want to write with a sufficient amount of text around the area where I am writing to give me full context. That's how I have been trained and and so have most people. I'm not sure why this would baffle anybody.