Computers Windows Internet

Alternative keyboards for iPhone. Using the iPhone Keyboard

The new eighth version of the "apple" operating system has finally "untied the hands" of Apple users, because now they can even change their keyboard on their own. Apple fans did not have to wait long until the AppStore was filled with themed applications - already now there are several keyboards that cope with text input better than the standard one.

Price: Free

Chinese developer CooTek introduced the Touch Pal app right after the release of iOS 8 in 2014. Russian users at first ignored the Touch Pal keyboard, because it did not support the Russian language for quite a long time. Since the advent of the Cyrillic alphabet, there has been no end to enthusiastic comments on thematic forums.

  • Design. Keyboard for iPhone Touch Pal looks very similar to the "native", so the user does not feel like he switched from iPhone to another gadget. At the same time, the Touch Pal functionality is much richer.
  • Set with swipes and swipes.Touch Pal curve acts as an analogue of Swype technology and allows you to write words without lifting your finger from the screen. There is also a Wave mode that is responsible for predictive text input: the keyboard is able to predict not only the end of the word that the user enters, but also the next word.
  • Price. Touch Pal is a completely free product, unlike other virtual keyboards (although they are usually not expensive).

Touch Pal has a curious drawback: the user cannot switch to punctuation marks and numbers. To put any punctuation mark, you have to press the key for a long time - this slows down the process of writing a message.

minuum

Price: 299 p. +

At the time of entering text, the “useful” screen area is almost halved - this is exactly what the developers of the Minuum application noticed. The problem was solved in a rather original way: the keyboard was simply "flattened" vertically. Minuum is a strip with a minimum number of buttons, each of which contains 3 letters (for example, the first button is Q, A and Z at once). Such an iOS keyboard takes up no more than a quarter of the screen.

An Apple user may have doubts: is it possible to type correctly and quickly with this arrangement of letters? It turned out that the lack of information about the vertical arrangement of letters is easily compensated for by dictionaries and recognition algorithms, the presence of which any gadget can now boast of. If you need precise data entry (for example, URLs), it is very easy to give the keys a standard look by swiping your finger from bottom to top. As for the speed of printing, it, on the contrary, increases, moreover, very significantly.

However, Minuum has a couple of disadvantages:

  • For users with thick fingers, the installation of such a keyboard is contraindicated.
  • Minuum is a rather expensive pleasure: you can download the keyboard for 299 rubles.

Flexy

Price: Free+

Fleksy is the fastest keyboard in the world, and this is not a subjective assessment, but an experimentally proven fact. A 16-year-old Brazilian youth set the record by typing a complex sentence of 25 words in just 18 seconds. He used exactly Fleksy, which was listed in the Guinness Book of Records! In addition, the Fleksy keyboard is interesting in that over 4 million dollars of investment was attracted for its development.

The main advantage of Fleksy is that it is not at all necessary to hit the keys when typing - even if all four letters in a four-letter word are typed incorrectly, the user will receive desired result. It is only important that the number of letters in the word matches and misses by the keys are not very serious.

Flexy has other advantages:

  • Over 40 languages ​​supported(including Russian).
  • Flex application setup: You can make your iPhone keyboard more beautiful by changing its color or adjust the key size to increase the usable screen area.
  • Installing additional extensions designed to make communication fun. You can express yourself with the help of GIFs, emoticons, emoji (of which there are more than 8 hundred).

The only negative is the difficulty of entering punctuation marks. In order to quickly put signs, you will have to set up gesture control.

How to change the keyboard on iPhone?

An iPhone or iPad user has the opportunity to download several keyboards from the AppStore at once and change them at least daily. To activate the downloaded keyboard, you need to follow the path " Settings» — « Main» — « Keyboard» — « Keyboards» — « New keyboards". A list will appear - the user should check the box next to the virtual keyboard that he wants to use. In the settings of the application itself, you need to activate the toggle switch " Allow full access».

Conclusion

The choice of a virtual keyboard is an extremely subjective matter, so recommendations which one is better will be redundant. Try out as many free options as you can and settle on the one that seems most convenient. Paid keyboards (like Minuum) should be used only in extreme cases - for example, if you have an iPhone 4 in your hands, where the keys cover a "good" half of the screen.

Good time! Using a keyboard (even a virtual one) is not tricky. Know, click on the screen and write messages, notes, sms, poems ... Well, or whatever you would like to print. However, sometimes certain difficulties or problems may arise in the process of work, call them whatever you want. And although on devices from Apple these same troubles happen quite rarely, no one is immune from them anyway. And since this can happen at the most inopportune moment, it is better to be prepared.

Therefore, today we will consider the most common questions regarding the virtual keyboard on our favorite gadgets. Go!

General questions and malfunctions

Keyboard missing on iPhone (well, or on iPad)

The reason for the keyboard not appearing can be either a not very correct flashing of the device, or the use of any tweaks (if a jailbreak is installed).

There are several options to correct this misunderstanding:

  1. The easiest is to reboot your device.
  2. More difficult - reset the settings.
  3. Even harder - make a complete . Don't forget about backup( or ) and the next .
  4. Long (but most effective) - install the latest software(firmware), even if you already have the latest software. Just update again.

Keyboard not working

It is important to understand - the display does not process pressing or the text input function simply does not function. To do this, launch any application and try to "poke" the screen. Depending on the result, we do the following:

  • In case of problems with the display, contact the service center.
  • If everything is fine with the screen, then the tips from the previous paragraph will help.

Functional Features

Split keyboard on iPad

The split keyboard feature appeared on the iPad a long time ago, this was done, of course, for our convenience. The ability to print with two hands at the same time, holding the device "on weight" is really cool. However, not everyone knows how to return everything back.

To merge, just swipe with two fingers as shown in the figure. With your gesture, you connect two parts into one. Everything!

How to change the keyboard?

With the advent of iOS 8, developers were given the opportunity to write their own applications for entering information on the iPhone and iPad. Which, of course, they did not fail to take advantage of. IN App Store(in any -) a sufficiently large number of various keyboards are presented, including those with the Swype function.

Among the most common are:

  • SwiftKey.
  • Swipe.

Both know the Russian language and support the method of entering text without taking your finger off the screen. What else is needed?

Installing an alternative keyboard is quite simple - download the application, and then go to the main settings - keyboard. And here you put the one that you need.

Change layout

The "globe" icon on the keyboard is responsible for this action. Short press and the input language is changed. But, as always, it happens that this very icon is missing. This means that you only have one language set for printing text. Add various languages you can go to settings - general - keyboard.

The iPhone has a built-in virtual keyboard, which can be used to enter text on your phone. Although virtual keyboard much smaller than a keyboard in general, it includes some handy shortcuts for quick typing.

The iPhone virtual keyboard will appear when you select a text field. For example, the keyboard will appear when composing email, writing a note, or when entering a website address.

1. Cursor

The cursor points to where the text will appear.

2. Letter keys

The main part of the keyboard includes the letter keys and the space bar. Use these buttons to write the desired text.

3. Shift button

Click Shift key to capitalize. Press this key twice to enable Caps Lock.

4. Backspace key

Press the Backspace key to delete the character to the left of the cursor. To completely delete written words, press and hold this key.

5. Numeric keys and special characters

Press this key to switch the keyboard from letters to numbers and special characters. Press the button again to switch back. It will also switch back when you add a space after a character.

You can also click on # + = to access other special characters.

6. Speech recognition

This feature allows you to enter text without using the keyboard. Click on the microphone icon on the keyboard, and then speak what you want to type on the keyboard. (Only available for devices with Siri.)

7. Space

Clicking this button adds a space. You can also double-tap the space bar at the end of a sentence to automatically add a period.

Keyboard Features

The iPhone virtual keyboard includes several features that make typing on the device faster and easier.

Word Suggestions

The iPhone will suggest a range of matching words as you type. As you type, just hit the spacebar to use the suggested word. In the example below, we have used the suggestion to change agreem to agreement. To close an offer, press X.

Auto-fix

Iphone automatically corrects misspelled words. For example, a misspelled word "eot" will be corrected to "this".

While auto-correct is a powerful feature, it's not perfect. Because the correction happens automatically, and you may not always notice when and what changes in your entered text. You should always double check the text to make sure everything is written correctly.

Spellchecking

In addition to automatic correction, iPhone marks spelling errors as you type. Any misspelled words will be underlined in red. To view possible suggestions for a spelling error, click on a word. A list will appear options writing. Just tap a suggested word to replace an existing misspelled word.

Moving cursor

To change a word at the beginning of a sentence or paragraph, you can move the cursor to the desired location instead of deleting the existing text and starting over. To move the cursor, simply click on the desired location. If you need more control, press and hold the screen and then (without removing your finger) drag the magnifying glass to select a location for the cursor.

To copy and paste text:

If you want to move text from one place to another, you can copy and paste it. This is especially useful if you want to move texts between different applications. For example, you can find useful information in safari and then copy and paste it into the application Notebook.

Due to numerous requests from our customers and site visitors who have only recently become owners of an iPhone or iPad, we are publishing instructions on how to how to add emoji to keyboard their devices to communicate using text messages received new emotions and colors.

Possibility enable emoji on iPhone or iPad appeared on operating system iOS, since version 5, but few, even those who use iPhone and iPad all the time, know how to activate them.

First you need to go to the device settings and select the "Basic" item there. Then scroll down to the item "Keyboard" and go into it. There, in addition to the input settings, there is a special item in which you can remove or add new keyboards in the operating system - the “Keyboards” item. We go into it, click "Add New" and select "Emoji" from the list of all possible keyboards.

After you add new keyboard, it will appear on your iPhone or iPad. You can use it in any application that supports text input. To switch to it, click on the button with the globe, as is done when switching the language.


Tags: ,

Perhaps you will be interested in:

6 comments to the article "How to add emoticons to the keyboard of iPhone or iPad?"

    Thanks for the master class. I recently became the owner of an iPhone, and I have some questions while using the gadget, since before that I used an android device for a couple of years. After reading the article, I successfully set up these funny emoticons on my phone. Now my text will become more colorful and emotionally expressed.

    Previously, everyone wrote messages without emoticons and understood each other) Now, personally, I cannot do without emoticons. Faced the problem of adding emoji to the keyboard on iPhone 5. Search query I immediately published your article, thank you very much. She did everything, it worked. Now you can communicate as before and not be afraid that the interlocutor will not understand my emotions))

    Thank you, otherwise I haven’t figured it out yet, after the android it’s hard to rebuild. Emoticons are very, very necessary, now you can’t do without them! I have a question, maybe a stupid one, but I'll ask it - are they all free? And then in another phone I had a part of the emoticons paid, I got confused all the time and inserted them, then when a message popped up that they were paid, I deleted them, I don’t like such misunderstandings.