Читать книгу iPad and iPad Pro For Dummies - Paul McFedries - Страница 47

As you know by now, instead of a physical keyboard, a virtual keyboard slides up from the bottom of the iPad screen. You have a choice of several English-language or (depending upon what you chose during setup) foreign-language keyboard layouts, including variations on the alphabetical keyboard, the numeric and punctuation keyboard, the more punctuation and symbols keyboard, and the emoji keyboard.

Indeed, the beauty of a software keyboard is that you see only keys pertinent to the task at hand. The keyboards in Safari, for example, differ from the keyboards in Mail. In Mail, you’ll see a Return key (and the @ symbol when typing in an address field). The similarly placed key in Safari is labeled Go, as shown in Figure 2-7.

See the little gray letters and numbers at the top of most keys in Figure 2-7? If you swipe down on one of these keys instead of tapping it, you’ll get that second character instead of the main one. Try it!

FIGURE 2-7: The keys on the Mail (top) and Safari (bottom) keyboards.

Before you consider how to use the keyboard, I want to share a bit of the philosophy behind its so-called intelligence. Knowing what makes this keyboard smart can help you make it even smarter when you use it. The keyboard

 Has a built-in English dictionary that includes words from today’s popular culture. Apple uses machine learning to quickly identify new trending words, too. Dictionaries in other languages are automatically activated when you use a given international keyboard, as described in the sidebar “A keyboard for all borders,” later in this chapter.

 Adds your contacts to its dictionary automatically.

 Uses complex analysis algorithms to predict the word you’re trying to type.

 Suggests corrections as you type. It then offers you the suggested word just below the misspelled word. When you decline a suggestion and the word you typed is not in the iPad dictionary, the iPad adds that word to its dictionary and offers it as a suggestion if you mistype a similar word in the future. If the term you typed is correct, tell your iPad to accept it as-is by tapping the term, which appears in quotation marks to the left of the suggested corrections. This helps train your intelligent keyboard.

 Reduces the number of mistakes you make as you type by intelligently and dynamically resizing the touch zones for certain keys. The iPad increases the zones for keys it predicts might come next and decreases the zones for keys that are unlikely or impossible to come next. Cool!