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Comment by crikli | Hacker News Reader

I help fund the iKeyboard, which was (is) very similar to the Touchfire. It's an excellent execution of what I now see as a fundamentally flawed concept. Having to remove an object from my iPad when I want to switch apps, which is often, sorta sucks.

IOW, the suck of messing with the iKeyboard > the suck of trying to touch type on the iPad.

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I'm not familiar with the iKeyboard — you have to remove it to switch apps? Do multitasking gestures help with that at all?

Any attachable keyboard on the iPad will be the same. When the keyboard hides itself (on the home screen, or any other screen without the keyboard input selected), you are left with a keyboard covering 25% of your real estate. However this review seemed to note that it is possible to click through the keyboard, which is a good thing in that regard.

I'm sorry, I don't follow. If the keyboard is hidden, why is there then "a keyboard covering 25% of your real estate"?

What he is saying is, if you have this plastic keyboard attached to your iPad, then you are stuck in software-keyboard mode. If you dismiss the software keyboard, then you have no access to the UI now displayed on the bottom half of the screen, without pulling off the plastic keyboard.

I tend to agree -- there are only a very few iPad apps that are designed to be used 100% of the time with the soft keyboard displayed. Even in mail, for example, you switch back and forth between browse and edit mode.

The software keyboard is hidden, the hardware keyboard is covering the screen area that belonged to that.

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