If you're at all interested in the iPhone (and even if you're not), you're no doubt aware that yesterday saw the launch of the new iPhone OS (version 4), just ahead of the iPhone 4. For the writers and Dvorak users amongst us, there's some good news and some bad.
The good news is that iOS 4 supports external keyboards (yay!) with Dvorak layout (double yay!). Sadly my iPhone is the old 3G, so I can't benefit from this exciting new feature - and carrying around an iPad and a keyboard would be daft when I have a MacBook Air.
So you have to ask yourself, why not add Dvorak to the selection of virtual keyboards available? It would seem like a no-brainer, and a trivial task, since it's just a tiny configuration file in OSX. However on closer examination it's not that easy, which is why I don't expect it to happen any time soon - if ever.
What it comes down to is a fundamental mismatch between the designs of Dvorak and the iPhone. The standard Qwerty layout places all the letters on the centre/left of the keyboard, with punctuation towards the top/right. Dvorak, on the other hand, places the most commonly used keys on the home row and centre of the top row, with less commonly used letters and punctuation on the bottom row and in the top corners, where they are harder to reach.
As a result, it's not simply a matter of mapping Dvorak onto the virtual Qwerty keys, because the keys that would have S, V and Z on them don't exist, whereas the keys for comma, full stop and apostrophe (Q, W and E in Qwerty) do. A one-to-one mapping of the existing keys would violate the basic design philosophy of the iPhone virtual keyboard, which is to have all the letters on the first screen and the numbers and punctuation on the second.
Hence, adding Dvorak requires a substantial recoding of the iPhone and iPad keyboards, to change the number of keys on each row. Not difficult, I am sure - but a lot more work than adding an extra config file.
Apple have gone for a quick and easy win by including Dvorak in the Bluetooth keyboard driver, where it is indeed a trivial addition - and I'm not ungrateful for that. When my current iPhone contract expires, I will seriously consider upgrading in order to get the keyboard functionality. Sadly, I don't see them putting the required amount of effort into the virtual keyboard - which means I won't be buying an iPad.
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