There seems to be significant interest in this, but we’ve had a few reservations:

1. Accidental triggering, which was a problem on some third-party keyboards. The solution Apple has adopted is to wait for a long-press on the space bar before activating.

2. This brings need to give up hold-space-to-repeat. Some say the tradeoff is worth it. Others suggest adding an option.

3. We cannot implement it as Apple has where the finger becomes a “joystick” that can move the cursor vertically as well as horizontally. All we can do is the way that Fleksy has done, sweeping back and forth horizontally.

4. Neither SwiftKey nor Gboard have attempted it, suggesting that a quality implementation is difficult.

We’ll explore this further.

What you are saying makes sense, and would not be hard to implement. However the trick is to keep the configuration simple for the user. It starts to feel clunky when you are having to select layout and language separately.

One idea might be to have an “freeze layout” switch which if unset (the default) leaves behavior as now. If it IS set, that layout stays unchanged, and only the language changes when selecting by the regular mechanism (either quick-switch or from list in settings).

We are considering this but have not come up with a clean way to implement it yet.

We can consider this, however:

- It slows down the use case where you often switch to an emoji keyboard, or to Apple’s (to get dictation button).
- It operates differently from the Globe on the Apple keyboard, so many users may have a hard time finding it, and/or Apple itself might reject the app.

I wonder if there would be any alternatives, maybe moving the Globe, or delaying the tap effect just enough on that key to avoid the accidental triggering during typing?

Thanks for your thoughts. I’m just wondering though, what would be the purpose of using PadKeys in this case? Why not just use Apple’s keyboard?

The problem you mention is an annoying one. But I’m not sure about solving it by taking up a slot on the suggestions row for (typed) or “typed” every time there is an auto-suggestion. The constant presence of that item is one of the things I hate about other keyboards. Is there any other way we could address this issue?

Hi,

Well, some people DO like having the forward delete, but it’s not for everyone so we have thought about making that a customizable key. But for now we’ve been holding off in the name of keeping things simple.

As far as the shortcut bar, we are unfortunately not able to access or turn on/off Apple’s own shortcut bar. However in the next PadKeys version we will be including undo, redo, and paste buttons in our own suggestions bar. We hope this will make it more feasible for iOS 9 users to turn the Apple shortcut bar off completely to gain the extra space. (And of course iOS 8 users will benefit from the functionality which isn’t available at all otherwise.)

Other peoples’ thoughts are welcome.

We are probably going to do this but have been trying to fully get the newly-introduced phone layouts fully settled and debugged first. Sorry about the delay.

For reference, we currently understand the main differences of Swiss German from German keyboard to be:

- Put French é,à,è in place of Ö,Ä,Ü
- Remove ß (or possibly put a special ‘ss’ key in place of it
- Add ç
- Largely different shifted number row

Could you be specific as to WHAT is slow, and maybe give an example word and the language where you see this? Also what type of device do you use?

In our testing on the slowest devices the animation follows the finger basically immediately and the suggestions appear instantaneously after the swipe is completed. There does not seem to be anything we would need to speed up. Note that we do NOT attempt to show suggestions DURING the swipe.

Thanks!

Hi,

You can hold down shift to type " !!! " or similar.

What do you mean by “case change options”?

Thanks.

Does any other keyboard make these an option? If there is something not working well about them in PadKeys, please try to describe it, and we will work on it.

We already offer swipe UP for access to shifted variant on the symbol keys. Are you saying you would like this on letters as well, or that you’d prefer down to up?

As far as keycap font, we’ll offer a “small-label” theme if enough users are interested, just like the current “bold” theme provides a way to have bold keycaps.

Please vote for this if you’d be interested in it on iPhone. If we did it, it would not be optional, but maybe phone model / orientation dependent. On iPhone 5 and 6 form factors (includes X, XS) there is not a lot of room in portrait mode, particularly now with emoji completions.

Hi, putting this idea on the forum so we can find out how many people prefer the backspace in one place or the other.

Currently it is in the top row. GOOD because it’s like other (non-phone) keyboards and allows the punctuation keys to be in their normal places. BAD because it makes backspace harder to hit and the keyboard is harder to get used to from other phone keyboards.

We could move it to the bottom row. GOOD because it’s like phone keyboards that people are used to, and allows the backspace to be easily hit. BAD because it’s different from standard keyboards and would move the punctuation keys to a strange, hard-to-hit place.

If opinions are split we might consider making it an option, but options make the keyboard more complicated to configure (and many users never open Settings) and to maintain.

In the latest release (4.2.2) we increased sensitivity at the edge of the keyboard, so it should be possible to tap more confidently away from the brackets and have the presses register. Hopefully this will reduce the chances of accidentally hitting the brackets.

We’ve now (version 4.4.1) made all of these common characters accessible after pressing opt, no additional shift is needed. Is this alternative still needed? If so, how would the uppercase versions of these letters be obtained? And is this about getting to the keys (which would be same number of taps either way), or labeling them in some way so the character “behind them on opt” is visible?