This is the kind of thing that separates Apple from the rest of the crowd.

In this case? A small, but nice feature. But it's this degree of perfectionism that also means that they have the smoothest animations of any smartphone OS, the most responsive interfaces, the most carefully constructed hardware that feels just right in your hand.

Taken together this stuff makes a huge difference, but it's only achievable with a pathological obsession with detail. Android and Windows 7 don't have that. At least not yet.

I don't actually like the look of iOS very much, but the attention to detail they put into the user experience is a wonderful thing.

Perhaps it's why Apple is slow to add features, because they spend so much time trying to perfect things.

I agree with your feelings on the look of iOS, and I think the attention to detail is generally really good. Given that I don't understand why their soft keyboard doesn't show lower case letters when inputting in lower case.

Probably because keyboards don't and more people would find it more odd than useful.

In general, Apple favors skeuomorphism.

What would be really slick is if the iPad remembered this and, once it realized you do this all the time, made a note to quietly display the keys where you want them from then on.

It's nice to know they do this. When I was using my parent's iPad last weekend I used the keyboard in split mode and it was quite nice except for the B key. It bothered me to no end that it was on the wrong side. While it looks better visually the way it is, I found it odd to type on because of that. If I had known that I could just pretended the B was there and everything worked that would have been great.

It would also be nice to be able to drag the split keyboard up and down. Depending on what I'm doing, it would be nice to be able to lower it on the screen, but that's a pretty minor complaint.

If you hold the bottom right key (the one that hides the keyboard) you can drag it up and down.

So that's why it has those horizontal lines on it! I can't tell you how long I tried to figure out why they were there.

This seems to be more of a necessity than a nicety. The split keyboard struck me as a classic Apple example of form over function: in touch typing the 'B' key is struck with the left hand.

Does 'in touch' refer to on devices as the iPhone or iTouch or with regular old keyboards?

I hit the B with my left hand on a normal keyboard; fairly certain that's the way all professional typing courses teach teach you to do it.

I have been told one of the secrets to really fast typing is to use whichever index finger is closer. With some preference for alternating hands so TB is a clear win for the right hand.

pretty sure "touch typing" was meant in the old sense where it contrasts with "hunt and peck"

Indeed; why not just draw those keys like a sensible person would?

I just played around with this in the emulator for a bit and I discovered that the feature has some subtle nuances. Clicking on the same pixel can produce either the visible letter or the invisible letter. From what I've been able to ascertain, within a certain range of the visible key it favors the visible key if you're typing the first letter of a word, and favors the invisible key otherwise.

Doesn't the the touch area for individual keys change size depending on what is being typed? The behavior you are describing should be the same on almost any key.

Indeed, you are correct. And the heuristic clearly isn't as simple as whether or not the cursor is at the start of the word. Clicking between O and P produces a seemingly pseudorandom alternation that probably has some basis in statistics.

I remember that the iOS 1 videos Apple made to introduce the soft keyboard mentioned that the size of the keys change based on the actual word that you're typing. (It's very unlikely for a user to want to type an S after typing P-I-Z-Z)

Yeah, I used to demonstrate this my typing "Americ" and then touching down directly over the 's'. Even though I pressed the 's', it was the 'a' that appeared. You could clearly see I wasn't even touching 'a'.

I think they got rid of this feature a few versions ago because I haven't been able to reproduce it. I suspect (but have no evidence for) that this is related to the typing lag that was really bad in ios 2 or 3. From my perspective, it seems they weren't able to fix the realtime correction so they made it asynchronous and just fix up words after you hit space. This is how it seems to perform now (and let's them offer more features like multi word correction).

I just tested that, and it seems like you're correct. I recall that simply typing stuff quickly could increase CPU usage by ~30%.

I wonder if this is actually a serendipitous bug, rather than an intentional feature? If there's a hit-test heuristic associated with the general keyboard area, then the edge keys might be passing off the key event to their logical neighbor, which happens to be physically further away.

iOS (neé iPhone) 1.0 automatically resized the logical size of keyboard "keys" based on prediction models of the word you're typing. The video describing this behavior has since been pulled, but you can read the a summary of the behavior in this 2007 article: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10114943-233.html

So, given that pre-existing behavior, established in iPhone 1.0 back in 2007, do you honestly believe the iPad's split keyboard behavior is a bug?

This is a very intentional and deliberate decision that improves the keyboard's usability while at the same time maintaining its aesthetics.

I'm not suggesting that the split keyboard is a bug. I'm suggested that the behavior of ghost keys to the left and right of the split might have not been intentional.

I understand; I'm saying those ghost keys are intentional, and are a logical extension of the "logical key predictive resizing" behavior present in the keyboard since 1.0.

I'd agree it "smells" more like a bug than a feature, since there is no graphical cue that you are actually pressing a key, also, holding the key doesn't cause a popup of letter variants like the ÿ.

Also - why is this HN front page material??

Do you have a new iPad (or iPhone 4S) with Dictation turned on? Try this one: Press and letter and then the microphone button quickly and repeat. Instead of interrupting your quick typing, it will register the press as a space instead.

Apple pays attention to the details.

If it only went one-way that might be plausible, but I don't see how an invisible-T on the right side and an invisible-Y on the left can be anything other than a deliberate feature.

I wish the split keyboard had the same popup letters the iPhone has. I can understand how the non-split versions are big enough not to need it, but on the split my thumbs cover the whole letter.

This was introduced with iOS 5. Are they just now realizing it?

The article was posted back in February. I'm baffled as to why it's even on the front page of HN, considering this is a relatively old and known feature of the split keyboard. (Well, I was aware of it, at least.)

The best design is the one you don't even notice.

I'm not entirely convinced this falls under the category of good design. As it stands, it's a fun and useful easter egg. But good design wouldn't have required a blog post months after the OS's release to inform users of the feature's presence.

Good design should have some sort of affordance. In this case Apple probably didn't want to have two instances of the keys along that border, but perhaps some sort of faded version of the keys could have provided the necessary affordance without cluttering up the keyboard.

This feature didn't require a blog post. It just works, and there's probably been thousands of iPad users who've pressed these phantom keys without even realising it.

Perhaps there were thousands of iPad users who used the keys without knowing it. I don't have access to those numbers.

But how many more would have used them if there were an affordance?

And if we're talking about good (user interface) design, there's an element of "what if everybody did it" involved. I don't want a lot of applications hiding useful features behind invisible buttons. I think having the keys there is a fantastic idea; I just think it would be better if they were visible.

You really don’t get it, do you? That’s pretty amazing.

This is about people accidentally pressing keys on the wrong side of the keyboard. It makes sure that those people are not interrupted in their writing, while still presenting a clear image to the user that is not confusing. It’s a line of defense, like the buttons that are actually a bit larger than they are displayed – just in order to make sure that users missing those buttons is less likely.

It’s error correction. The feature is not that there are repeated buttons on the keyboard and users can pick which they want to use. Users are not supposed to use those. They are not supposed to know (or have to know) about them.

I find the personal dig at the start of your comment unnecessary, but I appreciate that you're engaging me in a discussion about the design aspects.

I'll grant that if you're optimizing for error correction, it's a perfectly suitable solution. I'd even go so far as to say that's exactly what Apple was going for when designing this. Even so, I really think this is a case where showing that this is an option would be valuable. When I see a split keyboard, I assume that I need to press the keys where they're displayed and frequently have to slow down my typing to figure out which side of the keyboard the key is on. It's nice to know I don't have to do that.

That's too literal. This solution is the best possible setup for all users. If you're typing slowly on the keyboard and taking it literally you just learn the new setup. If you're used to another device and expect those keys to be in different places it performs as that users expects. Adding an option just places something on the screen that should really be irrelevant for the vast majority of users.

Also, I wouldn't take that initial comment as a dig, even if it was intended as one. I think it says something about the the discovery of this feature that you couldn't immediately realize the intention. The fact that it's not obvious to everyone what this is for gives even more reason for it to be a hidden feature.

You want something very different from what Apple implemented. It doesn't even make sense to connect the two.

It's really nice they did this, even if it doesn't work all the time (according to some comments above). I would have preferred that they put the B key on the correct side, even though it would have looked stranger.

I use the split keyboard all the time and for some reason my fingers seem programmed for the y key on the left hand, almost always. I've been using and noting this for a while but didn't realize that it extended to other keys. I think it's perfectly done; I use it by accident a lot and didn't even realize for a whole where the y key actually was! And this from a guy who types on Dvorak mostly.

I recall reading a blog post about this months ago, when the first iOS 5 betas were released.