I didn’t know this existed.
I don’t expect I’ll actually use it much, since I generally am not on my phone while riding in a vehicle. But if I ever found myself in a situation where I needed to use my iPhone while in the passenger seat — to look up information during a road trip, for example — I might give this feature a try.
➝ Source: m.youtube.com
Craig Grannell:
While I’m more writer than designer these days, I was trained in the visual arts. I was always taught that clarity and legibility should be at the forefront of anyone’s mind when designing. Surely, that’s even more the case when creating an operating system for many millions of users. Yet even in Apple’s press release, linked earlier, there are multiple screenshots where key interface components are, at best, very difficult to read. That is the new foundational point for Apple design. And those screenshots will have been designed to show the best of things. […]
Apple is still very often reactive rather than proactive regarding vision accessibility. Even today, there are major problems with the previous versions of its operating systems (one example being the vestibular trigger if you tap-hold the Focus button in Control Centre). One year on, they aren’t fixed. And now we have an entirely new design language that will upend everything and that starts from a place where clarity has been eroded, animations are even more prevalent, and broad accessibility is seemingly an afterthought.
I’m not fond of the transparent design language that Apple is adding to their upcoming release. It makes text significantly more difficult to read in a lot of contexts. As Craig mentions, you can just look at Apple’s own promotional images to find examples of this.
It goes beyond UI decisions like this, though. Over the past few years, I’ve been waiting longer and longer to upgrade the operating system on all of my Apple devices and that trend is likely to continue this year as well.
I wish Apple would get their act together, but they’ve made so many boneheaded decisions over the past decade that my expectation is that things will just keep getting worse. I’ve already nearly eliminated my iPad usage and have moved to Linux on my personal laptop. If the trend continues, will I be using Android in a few years?
➝ Source: reverttosaved.com
Lukas Mathis, regarding the Spike Keyboard:
I originally backed this physical iPhone keyboard on Kickstarter because typing Swiss German on an auto-correcting German virtual keyboard is difficult. If I turn off auto-correction, typing English and German becomes difficult. There’s no built-in auto-correction for Swiss German.
On Android, Kännsch helps a lot. It’s a dedicated keyboard for Swiss German.
Still, at least for me, typing on a physical keyboard always worked better. It helps me type correctly without relying on auto-correction.
I had never considered any possible difficulty in typing non-English languages on virtual keyboards. I still think Samsung’s keyboard accessory is an odd product, but I suppose there’s plenty of smartphone users who have practical reasons for wanting a physical keyboard — beyond the BlackBerry die-hards that I typically think of when the discussion is brought up.
Lukas goes on to mention another segment of the market who could benefit from physical keyboards:
I do have a friend who is legally blind, and recently asked me if I knew of a way of attaching something physical to an iPhone to get a tactile feel for where the keys are, so I’m going to give it to him and see whether he likes it.
Smartphones with physical keyboards are a dying breed and for some that’s a sad notion.
