from Hacker News

Charlie Stross on iPad Writing

by dbfclark on 12/12/11, 4:31 PM with 8 comments

• by robertskmiles on 12/12/11, 5:30 PM

  I recently got an android phone and I've been deeply impressed by Swype, which is an interesting idea. You put down your finger and move it over they keys you want to press without lifting it until the end of the word. The system then uses a lot of machine learning techniques to figure out what word you were going for. It works far better than I think it has any right to, and when typing english text i can now get pretty impressive speeds. I don't know about wpm, but I'd say it's pretty much the same speed that i can type with one hand on a normal physical keyboard.

  I think this is one important area where Android is far ahead of (non-jailbroken) iOS.

• by pragmatic on 12/12/11, 5:50 PM

  This criticism holds for Android devices also (including the Kindle Fire)

  At least my old HTC Incredible had an optical joystick that made text navigation much easier.

  Please device designers take note: FINGERS ARE NOT PRECISE ENOUGH FOR TEXT SELECTION!!!

  at least adult male fingers...

• by sbmassey on 12/13/11, 5:18 AM

  I wonder if vim would work on the iPad.

• by funkah on 12/12/11, 5:52 PM

  He's right about positioning the cursor. It currently sucks, really really badly.

• by Cieplak on 12/12/11, 5:33 PM

  +1 for emacs mention