The iPhone keyboard video shows how the spacebar is replaced by web-centric options when you’re entering a URL.
URLs can’t contain blank spaces so the iPhone gets rid of the useless key and replace it with ones that add value. Great example of context over consistency.
John S.
on 28 Jun 07That’s clever. I wonder they didn’t go with a unified address/search bar. Too complicated? I’m a Sidekick user and their browser bar works well with URLs and searches (if it has an invalid URL character like a space, it sends it off to google…an autocomplete list shows up with a ‘Search for search term’ option too).
Daniel Burka
on 28 Jun 07That’s extraordinarily clever. It’d be easy to discount that as an obvious idea (after seeing it!) but I doubt I’d ever have considered doing it… too strongly attached to the idea of consistency.
JF
on 28 Jun 07The whole keyboard video is clever. Some really sharp thinking there. Increasing the tap zone for certain keys when surrounding keys wouldn’t form a word, etc. Very clever stuff.
Ian Davis
on 28 Jun 07Where’s the colon, hyphen or question mark keys? Behind some kind of punctuation key I’m guessing. Bad luck to those sites with numerics or hypens in their domain name.
Manfred
on 28 Jun 07Punctuation is under the @123 button.
Andrew R.
on 28 Jun 07Its clever, and its probably a 99% clever thing, but most modern browsers do support spaces in URLs by auto-encoding them to %20. I personally think its far nicer to type in ‘space’ than %20.
That being said it is still very slick and makes me even more upset about the hideous UI choices other phone operating systems have made.
BW
on 28 Jun 07I’d like to see a study done on muscle memory and tactile sensation of the iPhone style “virtual keyboard” versus a raised QWERTY keyboard similar to Blackberry. There is much debate as we evolve beyond standard keyboards and into more virtual interfaces that can be customized. But, how much customization is necessary to achieve the task? Especially with human-computer interface design and issues surrounding muscle memory, recognition, and efficiency in design. I think we’re on the cusp of a new generation of interface design, but we don’t quite understand the impact it can have; positive and negative.
Rajiv Patel
on 28 Jun 07This is an example of an advantage of a digital keyboard over a physical keyboard (like those on Blackberrys and Treos). In the keynote, Steve Jobs described how most smart phones have a limited “bottom 40%”.
wa
on 28 Jun 07Whatever JF – thats not clever. GPS systems have been doing that for years. Apple knew enough to leverage that.
JF
on 28 Jun 07Whatever JF – thats not clever. GPS systems have been doing that for years
Then GPS systems are clever too. Clever isn’t a zero-sum game. The concept is clever whoever uses it.
wa
on 28 Jun 07In words of the PC guy, “touche”! :)
Kevin Marsh
on 28 Jun 07The BlackBerry browser does something similar, when you hit the spacebar while typing a URL it inserts a period (.) instead.
Eljay
on 28 Jun 07The PSP’s web browser also has a URL specific text entry mode in which you can’t enter spaces, since almost 2 years ago.
Chris
on 28 Jun 07The only problem is the spacebar is used to autocomplete words. So if you have typed in www.google.com before, and you start typing www.goo does it autocomplete? If so how? You can no longer hit the spacebar to say thats the word you want.
Charles
on 28 Jun 07I winced when I saw the video with the ”.com” button. I remember that from cheesy CompUSA Packard Bell keyboards in the late 1990s.
How does this work? Is there some sort of smart-feature where I click with my finger and burp twice so the iPhone pops up alternate top level domains?
It seems to imply I’m forever going to be typing out .net, .org, .co.uk, .co.whatever manually.
John Blackburn
on 28 Jun 07Contextually-needed keys like @ and / are also promoted to the alpha side of the keyboard from the numeric side. See here for a few more niceties.
Jacob Patton
on 28 Jun 07Yay for Fitts’ Law!
Naysayer
on 28 Jun 07I agree that this is a great usability feature for the most common case (URLs without spaces), but…
URLs actually can contain spaces. Not according the official spec, of course, and definitely not in the hostname portion, but spaces may occur in the path/filename portion of the URL. Plenty of users and developers don’t realize that spaces should be encoded as ‘%20’, and just type the space in the URL. All modern browsers I’m aware of just switch this to %20 automatically.
So… how does the iPhone handle this case?
Dan Boland
on 28 Jun 07What I’m wondering is if iPhone Safari will do what regular Safari does—type in “google” and hit enter and it knows to go to google.com.
@Naysayer: Sure, URLs can contain spaces, but really, how often do you find yourself a) coming across a URL with a space in it and b) actually having to type one in?
Evgeny Zislis
on 28 Jun 07Did any one notice that you can choose a wallpaper for your iPhone, but there is no actual place where that wallpaper is displayed?
Weird.
Evgeny Zislis
on 28 Jun 07Ohh… its the dot.COM all over again!
I was just watching the userguide videos, and since I have no blog that anyone reads – I have no place to express myself publically. That is why I wrote two messages one after the other at the same place that sent me there (apple) in the first place. Not sorry.
human
on 28 Jun 07It’s on the “keys locked” screen i think.
human
on 28 Jun 07i mean the wallpaper
Anonymous Coward
on 28 Jun 07@BW – muscle memory from other phones, or muscle memory from real keyboards?
I guess that a business man that owned a blackberry and is typing on it like crazy will have some issues migrating. But most other folk who are just using qwerty keyboards on their computers are not used to using 2 fingers for typing anyway.
Evgeny Zislis
on 28 Jun 07About this post-comment thing.
Argh, this blog should at least give me a warning with an option to stop the comment if I don’t have the name entered.
I didn’t want to be called an Anonymous Coward – I just forgot to enter my details above.
How to fix this: 1. when name is not filled, give me an option of “are you sure?” or similar, where I can choose to cancel and enter my name. 2. when posting another comment – remember the credentials I used previously. either with a temporary cookie/session, or a permanent one with a small click to reset the form.
just my 2 cc about blog usability at svn.
Phil
on 28 Jun 07OK, the nerd in me says, “of course you can have spaces in a url!” but – clearly – not in a domain name – which most people will be typing. I.e. www.site.com then they would navigate down from there.
Here’s what I like: The message from Apple has been chocked full of how great the iPhone is. Features! Ease! Technology! Simplicity! Very positive message. It makes the detractors seem even more negative. Also, it’s refreshing to see a phone marketed just for the hardware/software/interface. Most cell companies have made the phone itself a commodity and only sell the plan.
The plans are nice too, but I wish it were not locked into AT&T. Why did they do that? Why not an unlocked phone?
John Topley
on 28 Jun 07Presumably because AT&T gave Apple favourable terms for providing the experience that Apple wanted to provide. Also don’t forget that the provider’s network infrastructure has to hook into Apple’s to enable the seamless iTunes activation/sync/update experience. It would be too risky to do that with multiple providers and probably wouldn’t be technically feasible anyway, at least not in the short-term.
JF
on 28 Jun 07Also don’t forget that the provider’s network infrastructure has to hook into Apple’s to enable the seamless iTunes activation/sync/update experience.
...and don’t forget Visual Voicemail. This had to be specially designed by the provider (AT&T) in order to work with the iPhone.
Joe Clark
on 28 Jun 07“Add value”? What does this business-English phrase mean? Your iPhone suddenly is worth an extra two bits?
Paul
on 28 Jun 07Given that keys have been removed from the back of the keyboard, so the space is probably there…
Anthony L
on 29 Jun 07Still, how come when I see StarTrek people just say what they want and get it. Why do you need a keyboard if you can just say what you want? Technology like this is not only great for people with disabilities – this is one fatal flaw of this phone.
But what if you are partially blind? One could say why would they want an iphone.. how will they know what keys are what and where…
I only say this as iphone has a lot more visability, no pun intended, than say using a PDA. However there are voicepacks for a majority of those devices as well.
So, back to startrek… saying
Internet / Favourites / google… opens the application and takes you there. It’ll then read the stuff to you…. nice eh!
With some smart phones at present you can voice command playing your favourite MP3’s and the rest.
Still, how many of us browse the web while eating. I know I do. I think the design is innovative but voice commands are the way to go plus accessibility issues…
Jason Grant
on 29 Jun 07Nice. More work, but useful.
I am always for more usable interfaces.
Dave
on 29 Jun 07In firefox if I want to go to the Boston Globe’s website, I type “Boston Globe”. Firefox (or Google or some technical thingy that I really don’t care about) figures out that I really want to go to the newsprint homepage of boston.com – http://www.boston.com/news/globe/
Without a space, do I now need to actually type URLs instead of just keywords? Typing “signal v noise” seems like a more usable interface than having to remember “http://www.37signals.com/svn”
Having access to the space bar on a smart browser is more usable. I don’t use Safari, maybe it’s not as smart as firefox.
iv
on 29 Jun 07This iPhone keyboard is just a first step towards new interface for user interactions. Technically, there is nothing to stop Apple from making a full size keyboard with this technology.
Fully customizable, context-aware control device would be awesome. And you can mutate shape, number of keys, use sliders or knobs, etc. It shouldn’t even cost too much, seeing as iPhone has a lot of other hardware built-in.
I believe this spells the end of Art Lebedev’s keyboard built with custom leds.
Tyson Caly
on 30 Jun 07I’m writing this on the iPhone keyboard. I have to say I’m really impressed. Its ability to change based on context is slick. Typing on it is fairly easy. I’m sure I’ll get faster with practice. Anyone else get one yet?
JF
on 02 Jul 07The keyboard has been a pleasant surprise for me. If you trust it, like they suggest, it’s really pretty fast and efficient.
This discussion is closed.