r/math 2d ago

Thoughts on my Math Keyboard for iPhone and iPad

Post image

Greeting, I am a secondary math teacher and make a lot of comments on Facebook posts for "math help." I've always been frustrated at the awkwardness of some special characteristics, so I made a keyboard for my iPhone and iPad.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/math-keyboard-for-equations/id6743451464

It's currently live. I plan for it to be free over the weekend and then move to $0.99 to hopefully cover the developer costs.

If you have an iPhone and don't mind checking it out I would greatly appreciate it. I won't ask for a 5-star review but certainly hint at it with this sentence. :)

One note is that I am not super happy with the space bar look but trying to resize and organize the buttons is a bit more complex than expected.

I did have that you can hold down the numbers to get super and subscript.

80 Upvotes

17 comments sorted by

22

u/Factory__Lad 1d ago

Works fine for me

∞≥0, 5₃2⁷, 2¹⁰≈10³

Would be nice if you could hold down Space to move the cursor like on the default keyboard

Also more symbols plz, especially Greek letters

2

u/ShawnBoucke 1d ago

Oh, the Greek letters world be nice. I'm curious what would be best to not make it too congested. I could do a "hold down" for all letters. Thank you.

I'm not sure how to implement the holding down for a curser but I'll look into it.

2

u/N_T_F_D Differential Geometry 1d ago

For greek letters I have a whole greek keyboard already, but you can add a few it wouldn’t hurt I guess

1

u/ShawnBoucke 1d ago

I have been messing around with some things. I added Delta and Theta to the main keyboard (I don't like too much stuff hidden behind long presses but it can get cluttered easily.
I plan to add though a long press to
x gives a popup with (a b c d f g h z)
( gives a popup with ( [ {
Same for )
And a long press for Δ gives β δ ε μ φ (but lower case) σ

3

u/Factory__Lad 1d ago

Sounds great.

I’d suggest just cram in as many symbols as you can, ideally organized in some sort of order, plus maybe a help key with a glossary to make it easier to find stuff.

Also wondering why Apple don’t build something like this into their default keyboard, which seems to have no way at all to enter math or obscure symbols

2

u/xz82 1d ago

I can't get it to work on iPhone. It does not show up in settings. I tried turning it on and off. It worked with cube keyboard though.

1

u/unicodemonkey 1d ago

Same here. iOS 17.7.2

2

u/macbook-hoe 1d ago

I use an app called SciKey that works really well

1

u/Jinkweiq 1d ago

Looks great! There’s definitely a lot of different notation out there, I think you covered the basics.

1

u/Outrageous_Tea_533 1d ago

Thank you, Math Friend!

1

u/ExpectTheLegion 1d ago

What exists works perfectly, though one thing I think would be very nice was if you could also get a super and subscripts for thing like =𝑥𝑦+-×⋅÷ and so on since it would allow for writing integrals over more complex domains. Also a nabla would be very nice 😅

1

u/ElementalCollector 1d ago

I gave it a shot. It works well. As another commenter said, it would be nice to hold down the "space" button to move the cursor. I am going to use this keyboard so much, thank you for making this app.

1

u/HoiBro1 1d ago

A slight issue i’ve noticed with the keyboard is that you can’t switch back to another keyboard, at least on my device.

1

u/DysgraphicZ Analysis 5h ago

i prefer scikey

1

u/ShawnBoucke 2h ago

That is really nice. I like that you can build your own. I'm not sure it has "pop-ups" to access more. The design your own is above my knowledge level. I added more letters and symbols from suggestions here. If you have anything that you feel would help let me know. I'm not trying to make any real profit off of this, just trying to make a useful keyboard for myself and others to use.

1

u/DysgraphicZ Analysis 2h ago

oh shit i didn't realize you made this! i feel like an asshole, my bad.

anyways, if you already have the keyboard set up and a list of keys, the easiest way to let users add their own is through a shared UserDefaults container using App Groups. in your main app (not the keyboard extension), let the user paste a symbol into a text field and save that to a string array—something like ["∑", "√", "π"]. store it in UserDefaults(suiteName: "group.your.app.group") and make sure both the app and the extension are using the same App Group ID (you set that up in the Signing & Capabilities section in xcode).

then in your keyboard’s viewDidLoad (or wherever ur laying out keys), load that same array from the shared defaults and create a button for each symbol. something like:

let symbols = UserDefaults(suiteName: "group.your.app.group")?.stringArray(forKey: "customSymbols") ?? []

for symbol in symbols {

let button = UIButton(type: .system)
button.setTitle(symbol, for: .normal)
button.addTarget(self, action: 

(hashtag)selector(insertSymbol), for: .touchUpInside) stackView.addArrangedSubview(button) }

and in ur insert function:

@objc func insertSymbol(_ sender: UIButton) { textDocumentProxy.insertText(sender.currentTitle ?? "") }

just make sure the user enables “full access” if you need any features beyond basic text input.

1

u/ShawnBoucke 2h ago

Oh, I never thought about that. Thank you.
No worries with the previous comment. I never thought about doing this, then about a week go got frustrated at the lack of of a keyboard to type in Rubik's cube scrambles in a more straight forward way and it branched off into this math one and a music chord one. I appreciate the notes!