How To Make Typing On The iPad Suck Less

Video available at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=RGQTaHGQ04Q.

Typing on a giant piece of glass is a little silly! Tap tap tap tap tap, oops, taptaptaptaptap. So silly we made fun of it before the iPad even came out. We do it though, unless we have something like this (ugh).

But what if typing on a giant slab of glass was just a little bit better? This keyboard demo by Daniel Cooper solves at least part of the problem with the iPad (and other) touch keyboards — editing text kind of blows. The demo turns the keyboard portion of the screen into a giant trackpad of sorts with a free moving cursor, so it’s faster (and I’d argue better) for most people to edit text and highlight chunks of words than it currently is: raise your finger, plunk it down near the spot you want to edit or highlight, wait, then move the cursor where you want. It’s a slight shift in the general interaction paradigm of the iPad (direct manipulation) because it abstracts controlling the cursor position to a different part of the screen, but rules are meant to be broken when they make our lives better.

(via Subtraction)