Klavette is an iOS keyboard I designed and built on my own this year. This post covers what I cared about while making it, with what it does at the end.

How it feels under a thumb

You touch a keyboard thousands of times a day, so how it feels matters more than how it looks.

The loupe follows your finger, with a haptic tick for each letter.

Fixes are swipes, so there's no small button to hit.

Looks like it belongs

It looks like the iOS keyboard: glass, grey, light and dark. The colour comes from whatever you're typing into.

The icon

Thirteen rounds in one afternoon, from a single key to the loupe the keyboard uses when you hold a letter.

The final Klavette icon, large, beside six earlier explorations: a column key, a row close-up, porcelain, the loupe, apricot and celadon

The site

I designed and built klavette.app too. The page stays grey, so the only colour comes from the keyboard clips.

Room for play

Where it can't get in the way of typing, it's allowed to be fun.

Coming next: lessons as books on a shelf.

Or, by candlelight.

Badges land on the keyboard itself.

Each one has a card to share.

How I built it

I built it on my own from February to October: 1,349 commits, with Cursor, Codex and Claude Code alongside. I wrote every call down as a dated entry with the reason and what I turned down, so neither I nor an agent reopens something already settled.

I judge accuracy on first-try words from real typing, and I dropped most of the ideas that sounded good once I measured them. Typing stats stay on the phone, and there are no ads, tracking or third-party SDKs.

About Klavette

Klavette is an iPhone and iPad keyboard for people who type with one thumb and don't hit exact keys. There are ten keys, and each one is a whole column of QWERTY, so there's nothing small to aim at. You tap roughly, and the suggestion bar works out the word you meant.

A sentence typed without looking for a single letter.

The full keyboard is one swipe away, and it learns your words, your friends' names and your details.

Swipe up on a word to finish it on the full keyboard.

Or glide along the row.

Type a word in full once and it learns it.

Hold a suggestion to forget it for good.

Your friends' names, spelled right.

AutoFill and macros, from the bar.

Short lessons teach each gesture on the real keyboard, and there's a typing test when you want to see how fast you've got.

Each lesson takes about a minute.

The typing test, at my own full speed.

It's on the App Store, and the site is klavette.app.

Thanks for reading!