IPAChartApp

A quick review of the app/keyboard reveals that it will be a helpful, though slow, way of entering IPA symbols into emails, texts and docs on my iOS devices. It labels in great detail each symbol, which is very helpful for more obscure symbols where you might not know what they are, but as you have to drag the interface to find a symbol you're looking for, there can be a lot of hunting to find the appropriate symbol. I would love a “pro” version where the symbols are much more compact and less well labelled so I could use it more quickly. For any "standard" QWERTY (ASCII) symbol, frequently used things like s, t, m, n, p, a, i, o, u, e, it would be much faster to have a standard keyboard to switch to. Unfortunately, you have to switch to a whole other keyboard, which is slow at this point in iOS, in order to access that. A small peeve... Other things that I believe are missing: ɚ and ɝ. Yes, you can build them out of schwa/turned epsilon + a rhoticity diacritic, but that's clunky and is less typographically elegant. If they could be included in the vowel section of the keyboard (in the bottom left corner is the traditional place of showing them), it would greatly improve the keyboard. For the most part the symbols are in the standard iOS system font, Helvetica Neue, and the symbols that it doesn't support are borrowed from Arial Unicode MS. So you may find your fonts in your documents going back and forth between the two fonts. No font on iOS currently support the newish small letter V with right hook, so that's just not there. For the northeast and southwest arrows, they've creatively gone with the emoji for those symbols (these may look different depending on which device or app you look at them on), which looks out of place, but serves. I'm frustrated that Tyndalesoft did not provide any way for users to contact them apart from writing a review. I hope that they will see this review and consider upgrading the keyboard to include more features.

I've really enjoyed using this app and it's keyboard, and I understand what inspired the new keyboard layout, but I very much prefer the older keyboard. While somewhat clunky, it was overall a much better layout to have the keyboard as the IPA chart. I found it a lot easier to use as well as it helping me familiarize myself with the chart itself. Great app and I love what it does, but currently my experience is a bit clunkier.

Love this app, but WHERE is the alveolar flap R? Other than that, its the best ipa I've come across!

The layout of the keyboard match's the official IPA charts, which is smart and intuitive, but you have to scroll for a while to find what you are looking for, which is less than ideal. The charts should be reduced in size so they fit onto the allotted space of the keyboard. This might require smaller characters to compensate and it would necessitate the delabling of the characters, but it would improve the ease of use of the app enormously.

This is just what the doctor ordered!