The iPad’s split keyboard has 6 invisible keys

[ender7]

This is the kind of thing that separates Apple from the rest of the crowd.

In this case? A small, but nice feature. But it's this degree of perfectionism that also means that they have the smoothest animations of any smartphone OS, the most responsive interfaces, the most carefully constructed hardware that feels just right in your hand.

Taken together this stuff makes a huge difference, but it's only achievable with a pathological obsession with detail. Android and Windows 7 don't have that. At least not yet.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

I don't actually like the look of iOS very much, but the attention to detail they put into the user experience is a wonderful thing.

Perhaps it's why Apple is slow to add features, because they spend so much time trying to perfect things.

[raldi]

What would be really slick is if the iPad remembered this and, once it realized you do this all the time, made a note to quietly display the keys where you want them from then on.

[MBCook]

It's nice to know they do this. When I was using my parent's iPad last weekend I used the keyboard in split mode and it was quite nice except for the B key. It bothered me to no end that it was on the wrong side. While it looks better visually the way it is, I found it odd to type on because of that. If I had known that I could just pretended the B was there and everything worked that would have been great.

It would also be nice to be able to drag the split keyboard up and down. Depending on what I'm doing, it would be nice to be able to lower it on the screen, but that's a pretty minor complaint.

[SeanLuke]

This seems to be more of a necessity than a nicety. The split keyboard struck me as a classic Apple example of form over function: in touch typing the 'B' key is struck with the left hand.

[gghootch]

Does 'in touch' refer to on devices as the iPhone or iTouch or with regular old keyboards?

I hit the B with my left hand on a normal keyboard; fairly certain that's the way all professional typing courses teach teach you to do it.

[nitrogen]

Indeed; why not just draw those keys like a sensible person would?

[BrianHV]

I just played around with this in the emulator for a bit and I discovered that the feature has some subtle nuances. Clicking on the same pixel can produce either the visible letter or the invisible letter. From what I've been able to ascertain, within a certain range of the visible key it favors the visible key if you're typing the first letter of a word, and favors the invisible key otherwise.

[maxmcd]

Doesn't the the touch area for individual keys change size depending on what is being typed? The behavior you are describing should be the same on almost any key.

[rhplus]

I wonder if this is actually a serendipitous bug, rather than an intentional feature? If there's a hit-test heuristic associated with the general keyboard area, then the edge keys might be passing off the key event to their logical neighbor, which happens to be physically further away.

[ryannielsen]

iOS (neé iPhone) 1.0 automatically resized the logical size of keyboard "keys" based on prediction models of the word you're typing. The video describing this behavior has since been pulled, but you can read the a summary of the behavior in this 2007 article: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10114943-233.html

So, given that pre-existing behavior, established in iPhone 1.0 back in 2007, do you honestly believe the iPad's split keyboard behavior is a bug?

This is a very intentional and deliberate decision that improves the keyboard's usability while at the same time maintaining its aesthetics.

[epaga]

I'd agree it "smells" more like a bug than a feature, since there is no graphical cue that you are actually pressing a key, also, holding the key doesn't cause a popup of letter variants like the ÿ.

Also - why is this HN front page material??

[jbri]

If it only went one-way that might be plausible, but I don't see how an invisible-T on the right side and an invisible-Y on the left can be anything other than a deliberate feature.

[throw_away]

I wish the split keyboard had the same popup letters the iPhone has. I can understand how the non-split versions are big enough not to need it, but on the split my thumbs cover the whole letter.

[iNeal]

This was introduced with iOS 5. Are they just now realizing it?

[Braasch]

The article was posted back in February. I'm baffled as to why it's even on the front page of HN, considering this is a relatively old and known feature of the split keyboard. (Well, I was aware of it, at least.)

[J3L2404]

The best design is the one you don't even notice.

[BrianHV]

I'm not entirely convinced this falls under the category of good design. As it stands, it's a fun and useful easter egg. But good design wouldn't have required a blog post months after the OS's release to inform users of the feature's presence.

Good design should have some sort of affordance. In this case Apple probably didn't want to have two instances of the keys along that border, but perhaps some sort of faded version of the keys could have provided the necessary affordance without cluttering up the keyboard.

[zashapiro]

That's pretty nifty