I used to do it without looking at my phone, now with touchscreen I lost that ability, I have to check every word, some keyboards help with that correcting my words if I moved my fingers a little to the side, but it's not the same, with physical buttons I was sure I pressed the correct buttons. Physical buttons give touch feedback and that's important when you're focused on something important in your screen. I don't want to switch my focus from my screen to my keyboard every time I need to use a function key.
I almost always text on my phone without looking because the visual effect where the selected letter appears above your finger actually makes me slow down. I was never able to use physical phone keyboards as easily as the adaptive software ones on modern phones.
Also I use vi mostly so I only use function keys rarely, in which case I look up.
Which phones did you use? I used Palm Treos from 2004 to about 2009 or so, some of the keys even had a bump so you could locate the home row keys. You truly could type somewhat accurately without looking at the keyboard.
If it's anything like their existing dynamic stuff, I worry it will be too slow. There are far too many cases where I search for something, see it pop up, go to hit enter, and as I'm hitting enter, Spotlight decides to shift focus to something else. So for their magic toolbar thing to work, they'd have to do something they haven't been able to do in my experience.
That's fair. My experience has been, at least with the iPhone, that they've made an effort to make it more and more responsive as time has gone on. Tangentially, this is why I don't understand people who install these third party keyboards that make background network requests. It's like, the keyboard is slow enough as it is without having to go to the public internet on a cell connection :/
Yeah, I haven't noticed that yet. Not to say it hasn't improved, but I just haven't noticed an improvement. My other concern is workflow. Right now, the magic toolbar is only on the laptop. This basically means the magic toolbar is only useful when using my laptop's keyboard. Otherwise, it's really an awkward tool to use.
