Latin audience?
I would have thought this would be concentrated in the Vatican rather than the US.
Faciam me tunica mea
If ever there was a company that found itself in the right place at the right time, it's TouchType - the team behind SwiftKey. The firm is one of Britain's most successful tech startups: it says its intellectual property is used in 100 million phones and that its SwiftKey software was last year's best-selling program in the …
Just gone from a resistive touchscreen to a capacitive and hate the change. While one is more responsive, the other seemed more accurate. I miss the accuracy. :(
Most touch devices are annoying. I would see this kind of tech as trying to solve a problem created by moving to touch, instead of trying to remove the problem all together. Hopefully new interactivity such as LeapMotion will make input more accurate again.
(Esc, because the keyboard is best for typing. ;) )
I know what you mean.
Whilst modern smartphones have far more power than my old capacitive screened mobile, I do miss the ability to accurate tap with a fingernail. With a capacitive you can't, you have to use the huge squidgy end of your finger, which immediately obstructs the view of whatever it is you are trying to press!
I was thinking more of the predictive text capabilities - I don't imagine it downloads a dictionary of all the world's languages onto my phone, so must rely on a database somewhere in the 'cloud'. Without these capabilities, I can't believe its recognition of my vague swirls over the keyboard is going to be very accurate.
Why would it need a dictionary of all the world's languages? It just needs the common words of whatever languages you routinely use, plus whatever non-standard words you use. To achieve this, when you install it, it lets you select languages to download (English (UK) and nothing else results in an app ~30MB in size, a piffling amount), and it then goes one step further and asks you for access to your facebook/email/whatever else to look at your past typing history.
That's the main reason it appears to be so psychic. Instead of having to train itself over time with use, as its competitors do (or mostly don't), most users give it access to an enormous training set. The magic of Bayes's theorem means that the set itself doesn't actually have to be stored, only the resulting word->word probability values, which can be updated on the fly. Given a large enough training set to start with, this results in a very fast, very accurate predictor of what you're going to type next, without an enormous storage footprint.
I slagged off Swiftkey last time it was discussed on here... Something must have gone wrong the first time I installed it because I recently tried it again and I couldn't have been more wrong to dismiss it. Psychic is the word - it is so much better than anything else I've tried. Definitely worth a couple of quid.
The really excellent thing about Swiftkey 4 is that the 'flow' swiping and the tap tap tap typing both work together seamlessly so you can switch between them in mid sentence or even mid word in some cases.
I started using the beta a few weeks ago having been using Swiftkey since it first came out, then after a couple of days tried the flow method and haven't looked back. For some reason I couldn't get on with Swype, but this is just magic.
I have whatever software comes with the Resurrection Remix ROM on my S2, but it seems to do the same swipey thing and it's very good for a small screen.
I tried some swipey keyboard on my Nexus 7 and it was far too energetic because of the screen size.
For two handed typing on larger screens, I can't recommend Hacker Keyboard enough, especially when using the tablet for RDP as the keyboard layout is the same as a standard keyboard and very quick to type on.
I would have been with you on that but for me this still needs some work - unlike Swype or FlexT9 it's not very good on words with doubled letters or where swiping through letters gives an alternative word - it's always gives me "point" when I mean "pint" making it almost completely useless for the normal sort of messages I send.
Things have been improving through the betas though so it is well worth trying the final version to see how you get on.
I love when things I think we really ought to have invented become available.
I remember when I first laid hands on a Nokia 3210, back in '99, and as was the fashion those days, took it apart (only by prizing off the plastic covers and removing the battery) to see what was inside.
My immediate reaction then was to think that at that point the size of the phone was now dictated purely by the need to have a reasonably sized keyboard and display for the user. Whereas prior to that the majority of phones would have had their dimensions dictated by the amount of space necessary to fit everything inside and the humongous battery.
Nearly a decade and a half later and we still build phones that are based on the idea that we need a full keyboard to enter text with one, two if you're less patient, thumbs. Guys like these will change that, maybe not these particular fellows. Some sort of natural language processing combined with predictive algorithms should make it possible to speed up the input rates possible by use of a single or small number of digits.
Combined with some sort of discreet projection device to display images directly on to the retina and soon the bricks that we carry about in our pockets will become practically invisible to others.
As for the input device itself; transparent, conductive surfaces on the fingers, easily applied, connected to a base station wristband or whatever seems appropriate.
Hmm, must return to the present moment now...
>click!<
There was an accessibility keyboard feature ages back for linux, where you kind of flew through to the next most likely letter.
Based on this a wheel, which predicts likely next letters (and so words) could be made to be smaller than a keyboard gui and get rid of the size restriction ....tiny small round phones anyone ?!
Swiftkey do have a habit of changing device compatibility. The original Galaxy Note would work with SwiftKey tablet for example, but following a SwiftKey 3 update the split keyboard would not work and I had to resort to using the common phone variety. Try the other version to see.
Very disappointing - I just looked on the Play Store, looking to update my SK3, and found the same thing. It's not like 4.2.2 happened suddenly, without warning. I don't know how TouchType could have missed this. They're now not on the radar for any N7 user with the latest firmware; that's a decent chunk of market gone.
Still, SK3 still seems to work, for those of us who already have it.
Icon: "You owe me a new keyboard." Soon would be nice.