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Text entry remains a challenge on mobile devices.

Apple's iPad provides an on-screen keyboard that is better in many ways than real keyboards on real computers I've owned. It is not good at punctuation.

The keyboard supports multi-touch. This means that a user can hold 'shift' plus a letter or '#+=' plus a symbol and get a shifted version of the key. This is certainly more natural than the modal on-screen keyboards on several earlier systems.

Unfortunately, the 'ABC'/'.?123' button remains quasi modal. You cannot hold it down with one finger while selecting punctuation another.

Fortunately, Apple provides a completely unnatural alternative. You can press 'ABC'/'.?123' and slide your finger across to the (shifted) key you want. On release, the keyboard returns to its original state. If you never need a piece of punctuation more adventurous than '@' then you shall never want.

If you should ever need any of the Holy Punctuation reserved for Programmers then you will certainly want. The 'ABC'/'.?123' is not properly multi-touch aware. You can press '.?123','#+=',and '{' together and get a curly brace. Your keyboard will not return to its original state on release. Worse, you cannot use the funky 'electric slide' gesture from the alpha keyboard to get a curly brace at all.

The C language was developed not that long before the famous 1972 break-in at DNC headquarters in the Watergate. Little evidence exists to support a link between these events aside from persistent rumors that 'C' is, in fact, a programmer's pun for 'Water'.

Well connected C programmers in 1972 might have used a VT05 video display terminal from DEC. They had access to the glorious range of ASCII punctuation right at the keyboard though some shifting was required.

Years later, affluent home hackers at their Apple ][ machines were early victims of Steve Jobs' War on Punctuation. That keyboard supported enough punctuation to enter C trigraphs and not much more. No curly braces, no square braces.

Apple II+ keyboard
Photo credit: Bilby

Even the Commodre PET's crude calculator keyboard and the Atari 400's appalling membrane keyboard supported square braces. Modern scholars see that Jobs didn't invent keyboards without punctuation. He merely perfected them.

Quick 'C' punctuation can be brought to the iPad in just about the same way it has been brought to the masses for forty years -- with multigraphs.

In 'C', users with censored keyboards could use '??(' for '[', '??<' for '{', and so on. The idea, at least, still makes some sense in the iPad era and many shortcuts can be entered as quickly as with the iPad's own keyboard.

Go to 'Settings'->'General'->'Keyboard'->'Add New Shortcut...' and you can build modern di-,tri-, and n-graphs for your favorite missing marks. I frequently use the four following shortcuts:

lcb -> {
rcb -> }
lsb -> [
rsb -> ]

Apple could fix this situation easily by making the '.?123' key a multi-touch peer of 'shift'. They could do it without introducing any of the virtual silkscreen frenzy of contemporary Android keyboards. Not a single pixel on-screen need change.