When the iPhone first arrived, I didn’t get one. I wanted an iPod Touch instead, which was great for music, not so good for calls.

As amazing as it was at the time, the iPhone software was missing something, and it’s something that’s been bugging me ever since. Here’s the on-screen keyboard, as it appears now on my iPhone:

And here’s the landscape variant:

What’s wrong? Well, mainly the absence of beloved keys. Where’s my tab key? Where’s escape? Forward delete? The cursor keys?! Dare I even ask about Command, Option and Control?

Why cannot such buttons at least be put on the landscape mode view, instead of elongating the portrait layout like silly putty?

There is no getting around it: I often feel hamstrung having to use this simple keyboard.

Yes, I do understand the thinking that such keys would just clutter and confuse and that, with a touch-screen, they might also be superfluous.

Well, boo to that with knobs on!

• Placing the typing caret down between the two letters I want is an exercise in frustration;
• Tabbing now requires tapping – plus sometimes scrolling – different areas of the screen instead of one key;
• As for dumbing down for the masses, why not supply two modes with a keyboard, the same as for a calculator: basic and advanced?

For the app developer wanting to reimplement what was lost, the documentation suggests that such missing buttons should be placed (awkwardly) in a row above the other keys. It’s a bit of a hack in my humble opinion, and can look pretty nasty.

So, one of the things I wanted to work on for my software library was a decent keyboard control. If I needed to fit extra keys to my keyboard in portrait mode, I’d clearly need some sort of zoom (I also do for the iPhone keyboard, as I’m always hitting the wrong key at the edges).

Here’s my SuperKeyboard, as it appears on my iPhone:

Coding your own keyboard has its small challenges, including:

• dealing with the peculiar way iOS handles rotation (i.e. when it’s rotated landscape but the frame still thinks it’s in portrait mode);
• the carriage-return key, which has to be drawn separately due to its odd shape;
• dealing with bezels and safe areas (I would love to be able to access the shape of the screen programmatically; instead I am provided with four margin values).

My layouts are all very simple text files, which are then read into the SuperKeyboard, with the code working out the relative sizes for the keys depending on their types. As such it is now relatively trivial to modify any layout, or create a new one as desired.

Oh, and one last thing I wanted: a smiley keyboard with a spacebar, arrow keys etc.

Shifting does this:

That’s one more control down. 😉