Steve Litchfield

So I've been reviewing the Clicks keyboard for the iPhone for the last year and have done several videos showing its strengths and weaknesses (mainly size!): But then I tried to get too clever. The idea was to 'Enable full keyboard access' and then set custom keyboard shortcuts to trigger iOS Shortcuts. It sounded logical and it did work, as evidenced by the next video: However, there have been some side effects, not least with Apple upgrading iOS 18 and something clearly changing under the hood. What has been happening on simple, regular text input via Clicks, is that the space bar often gets missed and the fields and forms on-screen become highlighted with a neon outline. Clearly there was something screwy going on here, and it looked very much like an Accessibility 'thing'. Then I remembered that the shortcuts system above was part of Accessibility and I have discovered that turning off 'Enable full keyboard access' fixes the bogus text field highlighting...

Clicks is a fascinating story, from start to, well... it hasn't finished yet and even as I write this, (what is effectively) a version 2 with notable improvements is being made for the new iPhone 16 series. The whole 'you don't need keyboards' motif came in with the Apple iPhone in 2007, so 17 years ago, but while that's true on the whole, there are a number of use cases where a keyboard is surprisingly handy: When writing anything more than a couple of sentences, in a social or messaging or business app, it's really handy to have the full display of content and the keyboard separate. In particular, when working with numbers, perhaps a spreadsheet, having 40% of the screen full of number or QWERTY input makes things very tricky. Clicks solves that elegantly. Using hot-keys that you've learned on, for example, a Mac. So Command-F to find something in a web page in Safari, or Command-N for a new message or email, or space bar to play/pause in YouTube or any o...