MATLAB Spoken Here

April 9th, 2012

I’ve stopped being surprised when I talk to iPhone and iPad owners and find out they don’t know that you can tap and hold most keys on the virtual keyboard to get additional related keys. For example, on almost any iOS keyboard, tap and hold the “A” key to selection of accented a’s.

In MATLAB Mobile 3.1 on both iPhone and iPad, we’ve incorporated this behavior for each of the symbol keys in our custom keyboard rows. We’ve grouped symbols together in a way we think are logical: brackets, quotes, punctuation, math operations, logical operations.

Here is a catalog for the iPhone:

The iPad has the same set of keys in addition to the digits 0-9. The digit keys do not have any extra keys behind the tap & hold.

Let us know what you’d like to see in the next iterations of the keyboard, in the comments below.

By Michael Katz

Mike is a developer on the MATLAB Mobile team. When not describing himself in the third person, biking, homebrewing, or rooting for the home team, he's busy trying to make the world a better place for programming.

12:16 UTC | Posted in MATLAB Mobile | Permalink | 3 Comments »

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “Getting the Most of Your MATLAB Mobile Keyboard”

1. Yair replied on April 16th, 2012 at 02:50 UTC :
   

   BTW, the tap-n-hold feature is also available on droids…

   Suggestion – add the shift variant to the digit keys (e.g., the key 2 will display 2 and @)

2. Ryan Gray replied on April 22nd, 2012 at 14:08 UTC :
   

   Nice touch to have added the extended keys to your custom ones. A while ago I submitted a wishful enhancement request to have a calculator mode keyboard that would let you operate on ans and pick from vars in the workspace. This way, you wouldn’t have to fiddle with function names and parens for simple things.

3. Kevin replied on June 6th, 2012 at 08:49 UTC :
   

   Another suggestion – to key people into what the long press does, you can put a small icon of one of the long press keys in the corner. My current keyboard does this, Thumb Keyboard for Android; https://lh3.ggpht.com/RGrLy47jJoaX3FS7T1MZPhzTYGeBdexH66wmEc6IODpAmTLs-bcwlzNYPfjcwh5cKv4

Leave a Reply

<pre class="code">
a = magic(3);
sum(a)
</pre>

These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of MathWorks.