by Dan Moren
John Gruber on the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard
Among other iPad Pro reviews, John Gruber’s stuck out to me because he spent so much time talking about the Smart Keyboard:
This lack of keyboard support is prevalent system-wide. In Messages, if you start a new conversation and type the partial name of a contact, you can’t select from the list of matches using arrow keys or auto-complete the name you’ve partially typed using Tab. You’ve got to – you guessed it – reach up and touch the screen. You can use the arrow keys to select from a list of suggestions in the recipients fields in Mail, however, and arrow keys also work for selecting from the list of suggestions in the Safari location field.
Having spent a bunch of time using an iPad with a wireless keyboard, I’m sad–and more than a little bemused–that Apple hasn’t spent more time tweaking this for the iPad Pro. The company made such a big deal out of the potential of the Smart Keyboard, and yet it seems to have overlooked all these rough edges. It suggests to me that the people inside Apple aren’t actually using the Smart Keyboard–or hardware keyboards in general–with the iPad.