Show HN: iPhone 2005 weird "Blob Keyboard" simulator

Does the book discuss capacitive vs resistive touchscreens?

At the time you basically had two choices for touchscreens: resistive or capacitive. Resistive was "obviously" the way to go because it was far more accurate. Choosing capacitive was inspired -- when used with stubby fingers the accuracy problem was moot, and it allowed multi-touch.

Just before the iPhone came out I was fairly confident I knew what the future was. It was now possible to create a phone with the horsepower to run a real web browsers. 800x600 pixel screens were available which would display normal web pages nicely, and a resistive touch screen with a stylus would make them useful.

Then the iPhone came out. 320x480 screen meant normal web pages wouldn't display properly, inaccurate touchscreen meant tap targets needed to be increased massively. Why would anybody buy an iPhone which didn't allow you to install apps, and the web was unusable because it required rewriting every page since existing pages were unusable. Instead you could buy a phone which allowed you to install apps and which allowed you to usably access the web. Obviously the iPhone would be a failure. :)

This is pretty similar to the Japanese "flick" keyboard that's fairly commonly used on smartphones. Instead of 3 possible directions per button there's 5 (up, left, right, down, and neutral): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5UEsHEZWII

It's pretty intuitive because Japanese kana is a syllabary that's organized by their starting consonant and one of five possible vowels in the Gojuon system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goj%C5%ABon

I never got used to it but people who use it swear by it. Google even made a mechanical version for an April Fools a few years back: https://youtu.be/5LI1PysAlkU

Wow, i always think "i wish there was a demo" of each iterative step on these kind of design journeys. And especially the iOS keyboard, as i thought a lot about it. Awesome that you made this.

I really like their idea to make the touch keyboard work well by increasing the (invisible) "padding" area for the key most likely to be typed next. So obvious in hindsight but demos like your's show part of the journey.

There are rumors that in the beginning they tried the ipod wheel as the user input interface.

While working on my device, that idea is super motivating. I know where i am headed and have done a lot of work and really got something very, very interesting already. But a few parts are yet not clear at all. But, i am definitely further than our "clickwheel" stage. Not yet at the "secret padding" stage for some input ideas, but still.

In case you are free and interested to loosely talk about ideas or feedback you have for a very novel device (and interface), please let me know how to reach out. Just because you made this demo, i feel we'd get a long & i can learn a lot from you. And this might be a very interesting challenge for someone like you. Anyway, great work!

Unexpected Keyboard [1] has a similar concept: you can tap keys to enter letters or swipe to the corners to input special characters. It also has all of the usual modifier keys so it's really nice to use together with Temux.

[1] https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard

This is cool! Thanks for building it and sharing it. I think phone keyboards are simultaneously amazing that they work at all and also still need huge improvements. There was a moment in the early mobile app explosion where we had some cool experimental keyboards but they mostly fizzled out, were acquired and shut down, or didn't reach their potential (looking at you, keymunk). I still think about this space all the time but, like password managers, it requires such a vast amount of trust I think it's a hard business to get into.

Was hoping the LLM boom would help us get sane autocorrect to help bridge the gap but so far that hasn't happened either.

Neat prototype. While the key layout is unfamiliar, I could definitely get used to this. The layout reminds me of old cell phone typing, where each number had a set of letters associated with it and you had to press multiple times to get the letter you wanted. I wonder if testers at the time got confused trying to type like that.

Thanks for making this! I hadn't even heard of this keyboard layout prototype until now.

I have a few friends that use gesture-based keyboards similar to this, and I myself use gestures to type diacritics and punctuation. So this idea is still alive after almost two decades, just not mainstream.

Spent maybe 3 min with it and got the hang of it. I thought no qwerty was going to be a deal breaker but I think I could get "fluent" with it in a day or two.

The worst parts are: no upper case and the fact that there's no connection between what you typed and the keyboard once you submit.

Reminds me of Thumb-Key: https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

I'd be interested to try a full-featured Android keyboard like this.

One of my favorite virtual keyboards was a linear swipe keyboard called something like “Minimum” (minus some vowels). The QWERTY keys were laid out horizontally like a piano keyboard. Text input was fast and surprisingly accurate.

This was about 15 years ago, but then the app and company disappeared. I can’t find any trace of the keyboard or company on the web today. Perhaps they were sunk by some patent issues.

Fun, you can type "hello world this is a test" with only one swipe needed. "swype" keyboards could be seen as a continuation of this idea. At least, I think that's the chronology? Wikipedia says Swype Inc was founded in 2002, but the keyboard product didn't release until 2009.

This is really cool! What a neat little exploration.

I didn’t know about the history of the iOS keyboard, and this was a great insight.