Icky business: A silicone membrane for the iPad’s glass keyboard

The blogosphere is all about hype, and the Touchfire concept caught the imagination of Cnet, Engadget, Mashable, TechCrunch, and other populist tech blogs last June when the project was announced and again in the fall when a few prototypes were made available. It combined two sexy concepts: the iPad and crowd-funding, where ordinary people can help finance a startup company. (Kickstarter is the best known of the services that manage the money for such investments.)

As of today, the crowd-funded Touchfire is an actual product you can actually buy, not a concept or prototype for bloggers to briefly fall in love with as they chase the next new thing. But now that it’s real, would you actually want the $50 Touchfire?

Maybe, maybe not. The Touchfire is a silicone membrane overlay that attaches magnetically to your iPad’s screen, where the onscreen keyboard appears. The idea, of course, is to add tactile feedback to the glass surface you tap when you type on the iPad’s screen. You can also use supplied stick-on posts to better anchor the Touchfire to the screen; they stick outside the visible display, so they don’t interfere with any gestures you may make when not typing.

It’s an awkward design, prone to shift and come off. But the Touchfire overlay is also easy to readjust when you are typing, so that’s not a fatal flaw. There’s also a complex method of affixing the Touchfire to your Smart Cover so it folds out of the way when not needed and is thus less likely to be left behind accidentally (for example, if you take it off the screen and set it aside).

To me, typing on the Touchfire was, well, icky. The bubble-wrap-like surface for each key was unpleasant to type on. A simpler, lower-profile design would feel better. Plus, there are no indicators for the home row keys (F and J) of a regular keyboard; even though you can feel that you’re tapping a key, you can’t tell which one without looking. It’s easy to drift off, just like if you were not using the overlap and instead tapping directly on the screen.

I’ve never been a touch-typist — I missed that class in junior high school — so I look at the keyboard (on an iPad or computer) while typing, and the audio feedback is enough for me to know I’ve tapped a key. Plus, as my editors know, accuracy is not a forte of mine!

However, my colleague Pete Babb does touch-type, looking at the monitor screen rather than the keyboard as he types, so I asked him to test out the Touchfire.

His take was more positive, though he wasn’t a fan of the bubble wrap feel, either. He found he could type faster and more accurately when using the Touchfire than using just the onscreen keyboard — but only to a point.

One problem with touch-typing on an iPad is that although its onscreen keyboard uses full-size keys, it is not the standard keyboard. Only the comma and period punctuation keys appear: No [, ], , ;, ‘, or / keys, plus ! and ? are accessed by tapping Shift, then period and comma, respectively — which gets you on a standard keyboard. The Shift keys are also offset on the iPad’s onscreen keyboard from their position on a regular keyboard.

As Pete touch-typed on the Touchfire, his motor memory of where the keys are on a standard keyboard caused lots of errors when trying to capitalize, use punctuation, or insert numerals and symbols (both of which are accessed via alternative keyboard layouts on the iPad). That’s not the Touchfire’s fault, but it does show to truly touch-type on the Touchfire, you need to relearn your touch-typing for the iPad. That’s tough, especially if you also continue to use a standard keyboard on a computer.

Of course, that reality explains why there are a gazillion Bluetooth keyboards available for the iPad. I find I rarely use mine, even when I bring it with me — I’ve become comfortable typing on the onscreen keyboard, thanks to my hunt-and-peck approach. Pete has also found that his friends who’ve bought Bluetooth keyboards for their iPads stopped using them fairly quickly — the benefits don’t offset the cost of simply adapting to the iPad’s onscreen keyboard.

As a triumph of populist startups (that is, crowd-funding) over traditional companies, Touchfire is no shining star. Its product is awkward to use, and in some ways it creates a false promise to touch-typists who will discover it’s not just the lack of tactile feedback that differentiates the iPad’s onscreen keyboard; slapping an overlay on the iPad screen may not solve the problem they think they have. I suspect that most people who spend the $50 for the Touchfire will end up not using it for long.

Nonetheless, I applaud the attempt.

This article, “Icky business: A silicone membrane for the iPad’s glass keyboard,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.