The default on-screen keyboard on the iPad serves it’s purpose well. It’s big enough to be able to see the keys clearly, and small enough that it doesn’t take up too much of the screen. It’s responsive, and all the keys are in a familiar qwerty layout for ease of use. But it could be better.
This video appeared on YouTube earlier this week, and it demonstrates a very simple tweak that could be made to the iPad keyboard which would greatly improve it.
The concept is that the user is able to control the cursor by simply dragging fingers across the keyboard. And then you can simply highlight and delete text quickly by holding shift and dragging the finger across the screen to highlight, then tapping the back button to delete it all.
This is still just a concept, and the video tells us that if we want to see this become a reality, tell Apple. I hope they see this, but I also hope that the Jailbreaking community is already creating a keyboard tweak which imitates the vision.
UPDATE
Just as I said just hours ago, an imitation of the keyboard concept we see in the video has arrived on Cydia, available to download to anybody with a jailbroken device, for free. Search ‘SwipeSelection’ in Cydia to download!
