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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

The iPad’s software keyboard is still buggy as hell. The software keyboard, the part of the OS that the user will interact with the most, and the part of the OS that is required to be the most stable, frequently just completely breaks and requires a full device reboot to fix.

That, to me, is insane. It shows how shit the project management must be if they cannot even prioritize fixing critical bugs in the most important parts of the OS over releasing some useless feature that most users will never touch.

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I'll qualify this by saying I haven't owned an iPad since the 2nd gen, but how are the 3d party keyboards on iOS? Do they limit them like they do with non-Safari browsers?

I remember one of the main reasons I "jailbroke" my iPad was so I could install an improved/alternate software keyboard, but I remember reading they added the option officially a while back.

I'm curious: are they artificially limited or do they all just suck?

What bugs do you see in the iPad software keyboard?

iOS keyboard input and text selection has been wonky for quite a while, and from what I've tried of Android, it doesn't feel much better on the other side of the fence either. Why can't Apple -or- Google get such basic interactivity right?

For me the keyboard will sometimes not load properly. The keyboard just shows up as an empty pane. And that's a sign that my iPad is going to be all grindy and slow until I reboot it.

I had that problem during 13 beta, 13.0 and maybe 13.1 and 13.2 (the rapid fire updates immediately after 13.0), but never since.

I also have this bug, and a couple more. When you use the smaller floating keyboard at some point the keyboard starts to jump to the lower left corner. Swipe to type doesn’t work anymore.

I also have a bug with their hardware keyboard. After a couple days of usage the keyboard can get unresponsive and the § key starts to magically appear in the next text field that gets focus, at least 10–20 times, as it would be stuck. Reconnecting the hardware keyboard usually fixes this issue, but it’s still annoying. The restarts that are required for software keyboard bugs are worse, though.

Recently moved from android to an iPhone. The one that gets me while typing: I can’t tap and place the cursor in the middle of a word! Say you mistype a word, you cannot edit that word. You have to delete the entire word or tap and hold to get highlighting and then drag the highlight together to cover one letter on the word and then you can delete and get your cursor in the middle of the word. Insane.

Press and hold on the spacebar. Wait a second. Then you can move the cursor left/right from the spacebar.

iOS is generally quite good at these things. Like any new platform, you can't expect it the UX to be identical to an old platform that you're more familiar with.

But if the UX is objectively worse, requiring additional unnecessary steps, it’s super annoying.

that's subjective. It's not an additional step, it's a different way of doing it. I personally feel like it's better. I dont have to worry about not placing the cursor at the right place. I just click it and move the cursor around where I want.

I think my gripes so far are around discoverability. How did you know to click and hold the space bar? Now that I know, I like it. Never would have know otherwise. Drag from the bottom left and up to dismiss an app, do the same but go sideways to get to history of apps, etc.

They have most of this in onboarding tips as well as the Tips app.

Not sure what to tell you. I did not dismiss any tips that I can recall. I recall how to create folders and drag apps to it from onboarding. Mostly, I have to ask someone or search Google to find out how to do the most basic of things.

Thanks. It’s a shame they couldn’t display left and right arrows if you click into the middle of the previously entered text, though.

Wow, thanks. I had no idea this was a thing. How did you discover this?

Is there a similar trick for selecting text? What about selecting text from another source like an email or website?

That’s not a bug. It’s worse: it used to work the way you describe but that functionality was removed.

Next time: tap the cursor and hold. You’ll see it get bigger and you can drag it where you want.

Yep, this is an iOS 13 feature. Prior to this, hard-pressing the space bar was the correct solution (although it still works on devices with 3D Touch, and long-touch works on newer models).

Before that we had the magnifying glass, but I guess that wasn’t considered “good UX”.

there are a really large number of things i can no longer accomplish with ios 13 text selection model that i used to be able to do ... the easiest test case for finding all the flaws is trying to edit a url in safari.

ios 13 wants you to "grab" the text insertion cursor and drag it around -- but what are you supposed to do when the text cursor is not visible? and what are you supposed to do when an entire text region gets auto selected as in the url area ...

i would really love for someone to fix this issue

-- or if anyone knows how to do it ... here's the problem: say you have a long url that ends with a number -- and you want to change that number or select it to copy and paste it elsewhere. how do you do this on iphone in safari after ios 13?

tap/hold spacebar then drag.

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