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Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

Author seems to not realize that several keys show alternates when held.

I didn't realize that either! Although it just took me a while to find any that did, and even those that do are not very useful. For example round brackets, I cannot seem to hold down any key to get that character.

My biggest grips is 'n'. I keep conjoining words with n because it seems as though I hit that rather than space. Then autocorrect makes matters worse is that it figures it out and rather than breaking the words, it instead keeps the last word and drops the first. This is harder to spot when proofing than if it had just left the conjoined word alone.

I mainly use the blackberry for anything typing heavy.

Years ago, I experimented with a speech synthesiser for the Commodore 64. You used it the typical Commodore way: open a channel to the device, print command codes to the channel. Something like OPEN 3,12,1: PRINT#3, "H0E1L0O3 W0E4R1L0D0";: CLOSE 3 would be the obvious first step (I'm making up the details, but it gives you the idea). One funny thing was that, if you forgot the semi-colon at the end of the PRINT# command, you got an "nnnn" noise at the end of every statement. Why? Because all ASCII characters had associated sounds with the synthesiser, and the end of line character, which the semi-colon suppresses in a print statement, was mapped to the sound of the letter N.

Decades later, totally different technology, and you brought up that memory. Plus ça change and all that.

I wonder if that was related to "\n", or if the synthesizer intentionally mapped nonprinting characters to sounds (that would seem to make the command set more complicated than necessary, but bytes were precious then so what do I know.)

Could have been that, but I think it was just a coincidence. In CBMSCII, pronounced "ka-BOOM-ski", which was the warped and bizarre version of ASCII used on the Commodore machines, the end-of-line character was 13, aka Ctrl+M, not the C/Unixy Ctrl+J.

From dim, distant memory, every one of the 255 characters had a sound mapped to it, though surely I'm misremembering since there are only about 40 distinct phonemes in English.

I just remembered that it was called SAM, and here's the Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth Ah, memories...

I also hit 'n' as well, both on the iPhone and the iPad. I was worried this was just me, thanks for letting me know I'm not crazy.

I don't think his flicks are incompatible with the hold-for-alternates option, and the flicks -- with display on the keys -- offer a lot more symbols at easily learnable locations.

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