Wubi IME on iOS/iPadOS 14

[mungouk]

If there are users here who are also Wubi fans, then maybe it's worth mentioning that iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 — released today — now include Wubi as an input method.

 

Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards > ...

 

[Luxi]

I'm holding up the iPad & iPhone update in case problems show up. I read somewhere that the IOS 14 release was earlier than expected and some apps were not ready for it (after 1 yr talking about the coming update!!!).

Have you noticed any incompatibilities? If you have an iPad or phone, is Pleco 100%?

 

[mungouk]

Most (maybe all?) of my non-Apple iPhone apps now have black stripes at the top and bottom, ie. they don't fill the screen, which I presume is a symptom of not being updated yet.

 

Pleco still works fine but there must be a huge number of updated apps waiting for App Store approval right now.

 

As I understand it the main problem is that Apple only released the very final version (gold master) of iOS 14 to developers a day or so ago, leaving them all almost zero time to test their updated apps against it and then submit the new versions to the store.  It seems to have caught everyone off-guard.

 

[Luxi]

Thanks @mungouk

 

I'll go on holding the update for now. iOS 13 was bad enough, but this sounds terrible.

 

[mungouk]

2 minutes ago, Luxi said:

this sounds terrible.

It's mildly irritating to lose some of your screen real-estate.

 

 

 

[Luxi]

Most of the books I'm reading are in e-format on my iPad/iPhone. It'd be very frustrating if 10% of the text disappears.

[mikelove]

That's odd - we did just release an iOS 14 update today which should show up shortly, but I'm not aware of anything in iOS 14 that would force a non-updated app to have black bars; what model of iPhone do you have? (there's a rumor that Apple's going to launch a smaller-form-factor Face ID iPhone next month, and apps might display awkwardly on that, but it shouldn't affect any other phones unless they screwed up somewhere)

 

(that being said, if you view a lot of EPUBs or PDFs in our document reader I wouldn't necessarily rush to download that update - we had to replace the HTML renderer in order to comply with an Apple requirement, and we had to replace the PDF renderer because the license for the old PDF renderer was up for renewal, so while we tested the new versions of those two things extensively, they might nonetheless be a little buggy with some documents)

 

EDIT: I should add that on the approval front they seem to be doing a good job keeping things moving fast - we originally submitted this update on Tuesday a few hours after iOS 14 went GM, but we then had to pull and resubmit it (without it having been reviewed yet) twice; the latest version was uploaded at 12:41pm yesterday, reviewed at 5:51pm and approved at 6:04pm, so about a 5-and-a-half hour turnaround despite entering the queue almost a whole day after they started accepting submissions.

 

(it's possible this process is mostly / entirely automated now and they're just not telling people about that - e.g. a bot downloads the app, automatically checks it for crashes / private APIs, diffs some screenshots and all the human has to do is double check the screenshots that changed to make sure we're not doing something nefarious like linking to our online store)

[mungouk]

19 minutes ago, mikelove said:

I'm not aware of anything in iOS 14 that would force a non-updated app to have black bars; what model of iPhone do you have?

 

iPhoneX... like I said it's not just Pleco, it's every non-Apple app I've tried so far.

 

 

[mungouk]

OK, I'm back to normal...  

 

Settings > Display & Brightness > View/Display Zoom (at bottom)  was set to "Zoom".

 

Switched it to "Standard" and back to "Zoom" and now the bars have gone.

 

Edit: Nope... View set to "Zoom" and larger text in the accessibility settings brings the bars back.

 

I've also got iPadOS 14 running on my iPad Pro 10.5" and I didn't see any issues there.

[Luxi]

I had some issues with 'zoom' appearing unexpectedly and me spending a long time trying to find out what was going on, but it was in my old iPad 2 (now stuck forever in iOS 12, but still useful). I'll still resist the iOS 14 temptation and hold the update.

[mikelove]

Ah, yeah, that explains it - they added Display Zoom for iPhones X / Xs / 11-Pro-non-Max in iOS 14, but as far as I can tell they haven't added any APIs to support that screen resolution yet; with Display Zoom on other phones it simply gives you the interface that it would give you with the next smaller size of phone, but there isn't a smaller Face ID phone yet. (hence those rumors)

[imron]

On 9/17/2020 at 8:33 AM, mungouk said:

 

If there are users here who are also Wubi fans, then maybe it's worth mentioning that iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 — released today — now include Wubi as an input method.

 

As a Wubi fan, I feel that wubi is really only useful with a physical keyboard.
 

On a device with a virtual onscreen keyboard I much prefer to just use handwriting recognition. 

[mungouk]

8 hours ago, imron said:

I feel that wubi is really only useful with a physical keyboard.

 

Yeah after reading the recent account by  @Tomsima I was wondering whether its worth it on a touchscreen... surely Wubi's utility is based on touch-typing and knowing the layout.

 

OTOH, if you're using an iPad with an external keyboard maybe it has some benefit...

 

 

[imron]

If you have an external keyboard, then yes it's going to be fine.  Using Wubi on a device without a physical keyboard, but with a touch screen capable of handwriting input, seems a little pointless.

 

I guess for me, my motivation in learning and using Wubi was because pinyin base methods rely on passive recall, whereas shaped based ones rely more on active recall and I wanted to use a method of typing that forced me to think about the shape and construction of the character before I wrote it. 

 

The motivation was never to learn Wubi to learn Wubi, it was to learn Wubi as a means to an end (actively recalling characters before typing them).

 

On a typical computer the only means of achieving this was with Wubi or Cangjie or some other shape based method that allows you to put shapes together from the keys.  On a touch device though, the situation changes completely, because they all have handwriting recognition and this opens up another means to achieve the same end - and one that is far more suited to the device compared to hunting and pecking on a virtual keyboard.

 

Especially because once you've learned Wubi it's almost all muscle memory.  I don't think about the codes or the keys, my fingers just know which keys to press to make which shapes.  On a virtual keyboard where my fingers aren't on the home keys and I'm using my thumbs or a single finger instead of the finger that has the muscle memory, it would be a frustrating experience.

[Tomsima]

If its helpful for reference, I use an external keyboard for all my devices (the one in my post about cangjie) as I can type a lot faster and more comfortably that way. As a result, I do have a cangjie gboard on my phone, and when Im out and about and dont have access to my physical keyboard, I still use the virtual cangjie keyboard for typing.

 

I have built up 'thumb typing' muscle memory for cangjie, again for the sake of practicing character recall. I'm quite happy I have though, because typing like this is way quicker and more comfortable than handwriting recognition from my experience.

 

That being said, I would love it if anyone knows of any T9 cangjie keyboards for android, or even swype-style gesture keyboards based on cangjie? That would be the holy grail...making shapes that relate to shapes that relate to characters, interesting research to be done there...