I have a terrible beef to pick with Apple Inc. I originally started switching to Apple’s products years ago because they spent time to quality control their hardware and software. I was so tired of spending time fixing my development environment just so I can write code. The iPhone was a natural progression of jumping on this bandwagon. There are still several things that I love about my iPhone, but there is one default keyboard layout that is absolutely atrocious! Starting off most of us know what muscle memory is. Piano players have it when learning songs or site reading music. In order to site read music well a pianist needs to relate where the note on the sheet music is in relation to where his or her fingers are on the piano’s keyboard. The more a pianist plays the piano the more they know where the fingers go just due to muscle memory. Sending texts or SMS on a phone is no exception. People can type faster as they build muscle memory. Well Apple went and screwed this one up!

This is an iPhone 6 keyboard in landscape mode. Observe how the emoticons are on the left and the numbers are on the right. If I always type in one layout this is fine, but contrast that to the other photograph of the keyboard in vertical mode.

This is the iPhone 6’s keyboard layout in vertical mode. Notice how the numbers and emoticon positions switched from the horizontal or landscape layout.

I don’t know what usability tests Apple did in deciding to make one layout a certain direction and change it for a different layout. How am I suppose to be fast at texting or taking notes if the stupid keyboard layout changes every time I change my phone’s orientation by 90 degrees. The person who decided this should be fired.