Thank you for the clear report. The problem seems to be due to a bug in SimpleNote.

Once you’ve selected the text, copied, and tapped the cursor to where you want to insert it, there is no longer any selected text, however SimpleNote tells PadKeys that there is. This cause PadKeys to execute a ‘Delete’ action, since ordinarily when you hit ‘Return’ with text selected, that’s what should happen. Other apps do not do this, and presumably Apple’s own keyboard has other ways of detecting that there IS actually no selected text to delete.

If possible, please report the bug to SimpleNote. (We’ll try to report it as well.)

In the meantime, a work-around is the move the cursor right and left after positioning it. This jogs SimpleNote to sync the selection state to the system.

Since iOS 10 the dictation microphone IS available on X series iPhones. On other devices, Apple provides no clean way to implement it. The only third-party keyboard currently doing it is Gboard, which does so in a hacky way by opening up its own app behind the scenes. We tried this but were unable to get it working reliably.

If Apple makes API improvements in a future version of iOS we will re-open this issue.

PadKeys learns words when they occur inside sentences (so it knows if it should be capitalized or not), but words learned and not used again (e.g., because added accidentally) will be shown lower and lower in the list and eventually be removed from the dictionary automatically. There is no need to manually manage any of this yourself.

As mentioned in the comments, we are unable to provide this functionality at the moment due to iOS limitations. We encourage interested parties to send feedback to Apple on this matter.

Thank you for the suggestion and detailed mockups. The backslash IS in a non-standard position, but we are hesitant to make a heavily-used key (backspace) smaller in order to standardize the location of a key many users will never touch.

We fully sympathize with this.

Unfortunately Apple does not provide a good solution for this now. We would need to make either a dumbed-down free version or an in-app-purchase driven version. In either case, we’ve still got the problem that whatever doesn’t come for free must still be tried out only after payment.

In addition, distaste for the whole free download (and your personal information is the product) plus in-app-purchase philosophy aside, dividing features and/or apps like this would consume our resources that we’d rather put towards improving the keyboard.

Please send feedback to Apple requesting that they add a time-limited trial feature.

We are closing this, Apple has added this support for iPhone X family devices in iOS 12, and, given their demonstrated attitudes, that is the most we will get.

We agree with you, and really wish Apple would provide an API for third-party keyboards to trigger dictation functionality. However, they do not, even though they easily could do it without providing access the microphone itself which could be a security concern. Please see:

http://support.padkeys.com/knowledgebase/articles/1087564

Please let Apple know this is functionality you’d like to see.

As we’ve said elsewhere, it is not our intention to innovate the keyboard layout. We take the PadKeys layouts straight from Apple’s Macbook keyboards, which you can see on this page (including French):

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201794

I can’t really speak to WHY the period requires a shift in the French layout, but we assume people are used to it.

However, please let us know if the Apple page is wrong / outdated, or if there is some other reason we should not be using the published Macbook layout in this case.

This would conflict with the popup key menus some of these show. We now have swipe access the shifted versions similarly to the system keyboard in iOS 11.

Unfortunately Apple / iOS provides us no access to the actual text area you are typing into so we cannot draw red underlines or anything else. If you’d just like to turn off the PadKeys Suggestions bar regardless, go into PadKeys settings and switch autocorrect to corrections-only or off.

I’m sorry to give a negative answer on this, but we don’t currently have plans to support Russian or any other non-Latin-script language. In addition we lack a source of autocorrect data for Russian.

If our plans change in the future we will post here. The languages PadKeys supports are listed in our App Store description.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but although we would love to do this, Apple/iOS does not provide third-party keyboards any way to tell the app what text to select.

As we always say with this sort of issue, please let Apple know directly that you’d like to see this functionality. We’ve already submitted an enhancement request, but the more people they hear from the more likely they’ll consider it something worth doing. Thanks!

Unfortunately, Apple’s programming interface does not allow us to do this. Third party keyboards have very limited ways they can interact with the rest of the system.

Unfortunately iOS doesn’t provide us with any way to implement these. We have requested it from Apple and if anything changes we’ll reopen this issue.

We have “short mode” which frees up even more space than this would: https://youtu.be/F_Z1gVPSM4Q

While a hidden number row would provide an alternative way to save screen space, this plus the separate number/punctuation layout is so similar to what the system keyboard already provides that it would be better simply to use that.

This is due to an iOS bug with screen adjustment for third-party keyboards taller than default. Unfortunately keyboards are not allowed to use transparency so we cannot work around this as suggested. We DO offer a “short mode” though which will make PadKeys shorter than the system keyboard and avoid the problem. Just long-press the keyboard-away key while in landscape to switch to short mode.

Having these “extra” keys is the whole purpose of PadKeys. And we don’t want to overload with options. We do make the ‘A’ key slightly wider to make it easier to hit.