{"id":6860,"date":"2014-12-03T00:01:27","date_gmt":"2014-12-03T08:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=6860"},"modified":"2014-11-29T19:00:14","modified_gmt":"2014-11-30T03:00:14","slug":"mobile-keyboard-konsistency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=6860","title":{"rendered":"Mobile Keyboard Konsistency"},"content":{"rendered":"

Quick quiz for you: On your mobile device, where is the exclamation point key?
\n
\nThat’s probably an unfair question.<\/p>\n

Before you respond, or look at your phone or tablet, consider where the exclamation point key is on the standard computer QWERTY keyboard: It’s Shift+1. So when you’re touch typing (if you can), you know that to write something with a lot of excitement, you need to press Shift+1 instead of period to end the sentence.<\/p>\n

Like this!<\/p>\n

I’m a touch typist, but even then I had to look at the computer’s keyboard to find the key.<\/p>\n

Back in the day, most typewriters lacked a ! key. My old Underwood even lacked a 1 (one) key, so I used a lowercase L as the number 1. (That works when typing, but not on a computer.) And the ! was produced by typing a period, backspace, single quote.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I use a variety of mobile devices and one of the more frustrating aspects is where the symbol keys are located. Even among the same brand (Samsung) a character such as the ! can be found on the M key or the D key, depending on which device you’re using.<\/p>\n

Generally speaking (or typing), the symbol keys are accessed by long-pressing a key. Common symbols often appear on the keyboard itself, usually as smaller character or ghost images on the key cap, similar to what’s shown in Figure 1.<\/p>\n

\"Figure

Figure 1. Samsung Galaxy Note keyboard. See the ghost keys? Also note that the exclamation point has its own key, which is becoming more popular on Android.<\/p><\/div>\n

For more diverse characters, you can tap the ?123, SYM, or similar key and view the variety. Or you can summon a palette of alternative characters via the long-press — it all depends on how the onscreen keyboard is implemented.<\/p>\n

Alas, mobile technology hasn’t been honed to the point where consistency is found with the symbol characters. This is one area where the typewriter keyboard layout doesn’t help.<\/p>\n

Even back in the day, different typewriters used different layouts for the keys. For example, IBM put the double quote character (“) next to the Return key, but the Royal typewriter had that character as Shift+2. Even early teletype keyboards moved that character around. My beloved TRS-80 Model III used Shift+2 for the double quote and the @ character had a key all to itself.<\/p>\n

On my mobile devices, the Samsung Galaxy Note, the double quote character is found on the B key. On the Nexus tablet, the character isn’t available unless you summon the Symbol onscreen keyboard, and then it’s located where the V key is.<\/p>\n

Some consistency, please?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When QWERTY isn’t QWERTY enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-6860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-android"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6860"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6929,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6860\/revisions\/6929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}