Its funny that Microsoft didn't care to update their SwiftKey keyboard for new iOS versions for years and let it become a broken mess, and then when they finally release an update it's because of a fucking Bing button. And since the update also actually fixes a lot of issues it looks like they've had it ready for a while and just been just sitting on it and letting their app rot. Working there must be total chaos.
> and then when they finally release an update it's because of a fucking Bing button
To be honest and as a heavy user of SwiftKey on iOS, they updated the app and released a fix before all the AI hype in the last couple of months. They might have this in mind as part of their vision from that point, but it is not to say that
Wait, you were still using it? I used it for years and years but then they announced they killed it[1] last Fall and I switched to something I like a lot less.
Is SwiftKey back? Can I start using it again? Will they just yank it again in three months when people get bored of the AI gimmick?
It never really left. It got removed from the app store briefly but they reversed that decesion pretty quickly afterwards. I've also never had any issues with it on iOS so I'm curious why OP thinks it's a broken mess.
Only broken mess I'm experiencing seems to do with iOS integration of 3rd party keyboards. I think the apps are supposed to remember which keyboard you want to use with them, but the SwiftKey regularly persists even in apps in which I didn't switch to it.
I wish I didn't have to use it, but until Apple rolls out swipe and autocorrect support to my native language, I'll have to suffer.
For me SwiftKey is far superior to either native Apple keyboard or Gboard. Native keyboard has insane issues with autocorrect with multiple languages, to the point where it's not usable for me. My native (Polish) language also has fairly bad dictionaries. It's really bad overall.
Gboard is much better in that, but it has a lot of minor bugs that annoy me constantly and they refuse to fix them. Gboard will randomly show up with weird scaling issues until you hide and reopen keyboard, sometimes it will just randomly crash and restart while typing, often has layouting issues when switching orientation. Google clearly just doesn't care enough to support it.
SwiftKey fixed most of those annoyances for me. I dropped it when they said they won't support it anymore but I'm actually happy they reversed that decision and I just installed it again.
Exactly. And kudos to them for not removing the Swiftkey either during that time, even if they were not updating it anymore. It was a nice, functional piece of software albeit with some bugs.
My $10 says the cause for the decision to renew work on iOS SwiftKey wasn't "customer feedback", but Bing/LLM part of Microsoft realizing that their bean counters have just shut down the only system-wide text-based touchpoint Microsoft ever had on iOS, just as they want to start integrating Bing/LLM everywhere.
That should be pretty obvious. ChatGPT is Microsoft's new golden child. Any potential interface for it will be getting plenty of attention and SwiftKey will suddenly be included in tons of management spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.
The Bing->Chat buttons just open the Bing app currently. I'm curious if they will directly integrate it.
> I actually was thinking along the lines of "interesting coincidence" but now I actually believe it is not a coincidence and they really did do this just to prevent people discussing welding Bing and "AI" into the FUCKING KEYBOARD
Alternative theory - When the iOS application was discontinued and they had removed it from the app store in October, they redirected their support site to just the android version FAQ's and have forgotten to switch it back.
As a further note, Microsoft support is centralised at support.microsoft.com and it appears that they are currently adding all these help topics there too:
Not directly, other than their Facebook where people are giving feedback.
As an aside, I suspect these bing-related features are the only reason the product was brought back from the dead. Looks like Microsoft are adding features to allow you to help author text supported by GPT (e.g. change the tone of the message, rewrite portions from the keyboard etc)
SwiftKey, Edge, and several other Microsoft properties are actually under the auspices of Bing Ads now. A while ago, Microsoft made the wild move to shuffle a bunch of branches under the leadership of former Yandex CTO Mikhail Parakhin. Gradually, Mikhail began to make moves that caused a fair number of the original Edge team -- those who had come from IE, brought up Spartan, then brought up Edge-on-Chromium -- to leave in fits of rage over the anticonsumer path the browser team was being forced down. The engineers revolted and left when they couldn't fight anymore.
LinkedIn tells a lot about people moving from Edge to other places and even other companies afterwards. Some of the longest time zealots of the platform have turned their back on the tools they helped make because of it.
Fast forward about a year and we get The Fucking Bing Button. A top Bing search query for several weeks was "Remove the fucking bing button in edge" (or some variant thereof). Top results are all how to get rid of the Bing discover button: https://imgur.com/qZQ1NLn
I would not be surprised if there was backlash against it in the forums that Mikhail did not like. SwiftKey is a much smaller product space that does not have a high revenue, which means that he has every incentive to make it bleed every penny it can.
Most of the bad things I see coming from MS lately are like 90% Bing driven, and 10% writing everything for the web and not native.
eg. with Edge it's blatantly clear it's not made asking "how can it be the best tool for the user" but "how can we best use the user to drive Bing+GPT"
A lot of product companies are closing user forums from the early 2010s.
My guess is that there's some legal issue involved. Maybe the lawyers were convinced that somebody posting illegal or confidential info on an unmoderated forum is a big risk, and deleting the entire things is cheaper than paying some moderators.
> My guess is that there's some legal issue involved
They are just cutting costs. Forums need moderators (I am one of them, lol), and businesses can't rely on volunteers for that. Expect them to open new forums whenever they need to push adoption of some new product, re-hiring mods as part of the budget for that push.
Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly does swiftkey offer over the usual keyboard? A quick google seems to bring up "better predictive text" and "better multi-language support" - is that it?
I mean, you say "is this it?", but the multi-language support of literally all other Android keyboards I've used are basically unusable. Take Google's default keyboard, it requires you manually switch languages for swiping and predictive text to work. But that's completely unworkable for the way multi-lingual people end up actually typing texting. I swap back and forth across languages, even if just for 1 or 2 words and having to explicitly toggle languages is a MAJOR speedbump in typing.
Swiftkey just lets me auto-complete/swipe in multiple languages seamlessly. Want to swipe 1 English word inside a completely Dutch sentence? No problem. The reverse? No problem. Using Google's keyboard the same way is endlessly frustrating.
What do you mean when you say "Google's keyboard"? I use Gboard and frequently swipe sentences which mix Spanish and English just fine. You enable "Multilingual typing" on the specific keyboard and then tick off languages from other installed keyboards to enable them. Maybe you haven't tried gboard for a long time?
There's some internal matrix of "Supported" clean movement, mostly between languages with an extensive shared vocabulary. You can enable Multilingual Typing theoretically anywhere, but it only really "works" among languages that share a layout and character dictionary.
But if you need to loanword a non-common word from English into another language (e.g. Hebrew), Gboard just can't do it. If you change character sets, you change entire dictionaries. SwiftKey has a unified dictionary among all languages and makes a best guess approximation based on the current language selected and then tries the other languages you have configured.
This means that if you're going along in, say, French, but then need to reference a word in Hebrew, you can swipe over to Hebrew, bang out a word, then swap back to French, type words in English (which get autocorrected in english) and then continue in French. This isn't really feasible in Gboard without a lot of back and forth.
Maybe Google updated the Gboard since the last time you used it, but it definitely predicts from multiple languages in the same sentence for the last couple of months at least.
The default one on Samsung will let you select multiple languages under "Suggest text predictions". Not sure if that's a clone of the default Google one, but I had so far assumed so. Seems to switch decently between Dutch and English, for me.
Yeah. Though decently is not the same as excellently.
Written on a SwiftKey keyboard used to write English, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic with minimal issues.
Though to be fair, I think the stock keyboard is probably almost as good these days and that the difference is that my SwiftKey keyboard has been trained on my writing for several years.
Though I have no idea more than that I quickly get annoyed when I try to type on the stock one.
I use GBoard with both English and Spanish installed, and I don't have to manually switch anything to swipe in both languages, or get predictive text in both languages.
The predictive text combined with the predictive autocomplete are so good that they changed the way I type on my phone. I don't even need to hit the right letters anymore, the need for precisions has disappeared almost completely. This has massively sped up typing on my phone. There's also a wide variety of customisations (including an easy height slider and several input modes that you can adjust to any device) that many competing keyboards lack.
This is very obvious when I need to type on someone else's device or when I try other keyboards. They do similar things, each in their own way, but just don't do it quite so well as SwiftKey does it.
Since Microsoft bought the app I've stopped logging into it with an account (so reinstalls and new phones mean I need to retrain the keyboard) and have taken away the internet permission so it can't do any creepy stuff like send telemetry. Somehow Bing found itself into the keyboard, probably an automatic update I forgot to turn off in the Play store.
The addition of Bing is just one more sad step in the development of the app I probably use most on my phone. I switched to SwiftKey exactly because I didn't trust Google's Gboard and now all this Cortana 2.0 crap is making the keyboard just as bad as the one I dropped years ago.
Curious about that. I don't exactly like Microsoft, but them buying it made me trust it more with my data than some random small company. I expect MS to have routines around data security and they they have very little incentive to use my data in illegal ways, eg try to sniff my passwords or something like that. So with MS owning it, I trust more that they don't store text written in password fields (and it never suggests any of my passwords) than if it's some small company that I've never heard of and making a keyboard without a clear way of monetizing it (though I'd absolutely pay quite a lot for SwiftKey).
If I have to enter passwords I use Keepass' keyboard, also because I store them in that password manager and its keyboard has one User and one Password key. I switch with a small button to the right of Android's back button.
Swiping and the features you mentioned are amongst the best I've tried. So yes, it's a "better" "usual" keyboard that makes me type more efficiently than other keyboards. E.g. Gboard doesn't come close and feels like a big downgrade.
Fast edit: it's Monday morning, I didn't realise there were so many other replies already.
I'm someone who switched from SwiftKey (paid plan) to GBoard, and never looked back. I much prefer GBoard to SwiftKey. So it might be a matter of preference
Really? I hope you're right, I'm looking for a better alternative than SwiftKey, but I haven't found any yet. I'll try GBoard again now, thanks.
EDIT: It's good, but not as good as Swiftkey in its UX. Swiping for punctuation doesn't work, you need to long press and swipe. Pressing space to insert the prediction and then pressing comma doesn't remove the space, so it requires an awkward dance to insert a comma and a prediction simultaneously. There's no gesture to dismiss the keyboard, the "delete word" swipe is a bit awkward, long pressing buttons doesn't give you punctuation, and that's just what I've found in a few minutes of use. I hope they address these soon.
Ah. These days I just use speech to text, with a combination of swiping sometimes and tapping for punctuation.
I also don't to use my phone much anymore (since I reduced social media usage and disabled notifications).
FWIW I think the reason I moved away from SwiftKey was because it kept having strange language issues in a multilingual setup, but I haven't used it in a while; probably 5+ years.
Maybe I'm just not a touchscreen keyboard power user any longer
My biggest gripe with GBoard is the word prediction for swipes that are ambiguous.
It consistently gives me "sine" over "some" and never learns. I type "sine" maybe a couple of times a day and type "some" dozens of times a day. I imagine getting the weighting right is tricky but it just seems to be wrong most of the time.
I don't remember SwiftKey being any better but I might give it another try just in case.
It’s a keyboard. Better predictive text and better multi-language support are flagship features. It’s such a fundamental part of how you interact with your device that even a tiny incremental improvement gets amplified into a sizeable QoL improvement.
Superficially yes[1]. But they are so much better, especially the multi-language support, that nothing else really compares. I've been using Swiftkey since before the Microsoft purchase, and really dislike having to use the default keyboards on both Android and iOS.
[1] It also has a lot more configurable keyboard layouts and theming, but I don't really use those.
A lot of customization options too - size and theme, number row or not, arrows or not, include accents in long-press menus, etc.
But the better predictive text is kind of huge. Makes typing much faster and easier when the predictions are more commonly correct. As an aside, I expect this could get massively better over the near future given this new investment in LLMs.
I've been using it on Android for many years now. The stock keyboards are, perhaps ironically, like the stock browser in Windows was until very recently: the one you use to get the good one. (Edge is still that, but now it's also the place to use Bing Chat...)
IMO, here’s a lot of room for improvement for German, because it’s a real dice roll whether a compound noun will be recognised or not. You can try swiping the components individually, but then you have to go deleting spaces everywhere. Unless there’s a feature I’m missing?
This is the sort of thing I think someone would have found a better solution for if more languages (and possibly English in particular) had non-spaced compound nouns.
Swiping is a blessing on iPhone Mini, but it's not available in my language for some reason. Multilingual input, I can just start typing in English or Czech and two words in, the keyboard knows. And even for normal tap-typing, the accuracy is a bit better because the keyboard apparently learns from your mistakes and basically builds a virtual keyboard with shifted letters underneath the visible one.
(to be clear I'm petty enough to be willing to give it all up for not having to stare at a fucking Bing button, so I uninstalled it)
I don't stare at my keyboards, so I never noticed the Bing key, but I just checked, and indeed, it's there. (Now I'm wondering if I will now keep seeing it..!?)
Tbh I have to stare at my smartphone keyboard or else I make a lot of typos. And about the button, it's not even that it takes up space or looks that bad, it's about the principles. In my world, you just don't put useless crap on someone's keyboard.
It offers adaptive, predictive input without the "auto-embarrass" and "change my prescription" feature of certain other keyboards with predictive input.
It also lets me write multiple languages, with working autocomplete in each, without changing keyboard.
Finally, for many of us who needs non-English input, the obvious other choice of iOS keyboard doesn't offer any predictions at all. I guess setting up embarrassing word swaps for Norwegian isn't a priority.
I write in two languages several times throughout the day, and worse: I code-switch all the time between the two (in the same text, that is).
That is definitely the killer feature for me. So I have an old version of swiftkey, blocked Internet access because fuck me if I let Microsoft snoop on all I write, and an xposed module (Exi) with useful mods.
PS: if anyone has a Free Software alternative I'm all ears.
Other than the things it does well, it has great ergonomics. On large Android phones it lets you raise the keyboard so you can type in the middle of the screen. Everyone else makes you type at the bottom of the device which is unbalanced.
I use it because it has shifted characters over regular keys, so I can get to the most used ones with a touch-hold-slide action vs. finding the "other" keyboard overlay, then hunt for it.
> "better predictive text" and "better multi-language support" - is that it?
For me this is half of it, it's also performance. It is MUCH faster at bringing up word suggestions. As in faster than I can even reach my thumb up to type the next word there are already excellent suggestions available, and I often can type entire sentences only touching keys on the keyboard a few times.
Just the performance difference makes the iOS builtin keyboard predictions almost unusable for me (in addition to the fact that the predictions are simply much better on swiftkey).
I'm on Android and I've been swyping on my keyboards since 2011 and SwiftKey since 2018. It seems to understand the movements of my fingers better than the other keyboards I have on my devices. The currently installed alternative is Samsung's keyboard. I probably never installed Google's one.
If I were tapping keys with two hands, which I sometimes end up doing (single handed)... no idea which keyboard would be better.
On android it's the only keyboard I could find whose position (not size of the keys) you can adjust without setting it to floating.
With the bezel-less smartphones, I found that if the keyboard sits at the bottom of the screen, one-handed typing is impossible for my thumb. With swiftkey I can basically add a bezel at the bottom to bring the keyboard up to where I can comfortably type with one hand.
I don't know whether it's standard feature on other keyboard, I love to use the clipboard and the ability to pin past clipboard and smiley shortcuts allow me to search.
Those two are probably small unimportant that make it feels home.
It has a lot of themes and layouts, various typing-related songs, like if you want auto-capitalization or auto-spacing on our off, but the main thing I got it for originally was it was geared towards swiping to type,which I found to be a lot faster than Garrity letter-at-a-time typing... I don't know if it was an early pioneer at that or what, but it seems like most other keyboards let you do that now, so it's advantage (if it ever had one is less than it used to be).
But, in any case, I do like how it can predict a word as you type, so you don't have to type the full word out before releasing your finger and it will toe out the rest, and it does a good job of predicting phrases I types a lot, so for those I don't even have to type them out fully... I just have to type the first word or so and then tap on the predicted words to fill in the rest (or however many words of the prediction I want)... it can be a time saver.
> This one hurts, it really hurts. I think this hurts worse than Musk buying/poisoning/killing Twitter. I've mentioned this before but a keyboard feels like an extension of your body
People need to take a break. Being terminally online and complaining about everything is not a healthy way of life.
If a keyboard app feels like an extension of your body, it means you write a lot. It doesn't mean that you are "terminally online", and even if you were online all the time, that's a personal choice and not being online all the time doesn't even solve the problem shared here.
I'd even say, perhaps it's best not to tell people that their problems aren't problems to begin with. I'm not saying one should care, it'd be enough just not to explicitly dismiss on their face.
In a broader sense, it never fails to amaze me that a kilo and a half of goopy cells that evolved to work out where the plants that won't kill you and where to trap rabbits in the next valley are - things that are, generally speaking, not much further than you can see - can visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys *including ones we have not taken yet* but which happen to be in roughly the same direction as where we were a last week.
Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too.
How do we do this with a brain that evolved to cope with a couple of miles of hills and forest? Is it because I can drive a car at 60mph and therefore cover twenty times the distance I can walk in roughly the same time, so it all just scales naturally?
It's crazy, isn't it?
You'll be thinking about this next time you drive.
>> an visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys.
That is nothing. Try to run through a forest chasing a deer. Your brain will be calculating paths around trees, planning each footfall based on 3d terrain scans in your peripheral vision, constantly recalculating the position and likely path of the deer, and all the while a subroutine is calculating the trajectory of the rock you are about to through at your (hopefully) future dinner. That is what the human brain evolved to do. In comparison, driving a car along a road is like watching paint dry.
Then think about what the deer brain is doing. It does all the same terrain mapping and 3d planning, but does so at double or triple the bandwidth. Deer see 300+ degrees, humans only 130ish.
What really blows my mind about driving is that with a little bit of training, we get a feel for how big the car is. You can squeeze into a tight parking lot and you won't scratch your or the other car! By feel! We can somehow transfer our feeling for how big our body is to avoid running into obstacles, to feel how big our car is.
There is nothing in the history of mankind that would need for this to be a possible skill; no conceivable evolutionary pressure lead to being able to transfer the feeling for the size of our body onto other objects, while being inside those objects. We can just do that!
I'm not so sure. Using tools is the defining specialty of our species, and knowing where the end of your tool is in 3D space seems fairly important to be able to hit that tiger with a spear.
Well for this to work you also have to “feel” how big the parking space is, which is obviously not an extension of your body.
What’s happening here is that your eyes are connected to a very highly trained model of the physical world around you. And your subjective experience of vision occurs post-processing through that model. It’s the same model you use to physically navigate the world, so it has a similar subjective feel regardless of what you’re doing.
It’s not limited to cars and tools; pitchers can “feel” the strike zone, even though it’s 60 feet away. Like driving, this takes a lot of reps to develop (lots of training data).
We evolved to wear all sorts of clothing. And really when you think about it the brain is probably the descendant of some parasite which crawled into another organism and used the exo-organism as a puppet, so in a sense it's exactly what a brain was originally adapted for is glomming on weird new appendages.
> when you think about it the brain is probably the descendant of some parasite which crawled into another organism and used the exo-organism as a puppet
I haven't heard this claim before - any specific reading I should look for?
It's possible because the road you're driving is an abstraction that eliminates so much information.
While you're running through the woods, you have to see and account for every rock and root or you trip, fall, and get literally eaten alive. While driving on a road, you don't need to consider the road itself at all, really.
That's the technology of roads - removing all obstacles to travel. A road is literally an empty, smooth space. So now you only need to consider traffic, turns, and distance.
I'm not surprised at all that our brains that can probably remember the locations of every fruiting bush and tree in our territory can efficiently encode some turns.
Not really, but it's not very different. You just drive to the train, park on the train and drive off the train when it stops. I haven't been to England for a long time but when I did I was simply calling it driving to England.
I'd still call somewhere on the continent an 'N hour drive.' The 'drive' part indicates traveling by car the entire distance (I've never been on a eurotunnel trip where we bothered getting a cabin so we were sat in the car the entire time) and in any case it's pretty clear what you meant given the absence of pure land routes.
Being Scottish technically makes you British, at least until independence comes. I'd argue that, even then, it will remain the case - as long as we accept that Scotland will continue to be part of the British Isles, and in particular of the island of Britain.
I recognise Gordonjcp's autonomy to choose their own preferred identity. Nationality is a social construct that can be perceived differently in various contexts. If someone prefers to identify as Scottish rather than British, at least in informal settings, I believe it's important to respect their perspective instead of insisting on a particular label.
Of course, they might _technically_ be British from a legal standpoint, which I'm sure Gordonjcp is aware of. It's entirely possible to be both British and not-British simultaneously in different contexts. This sort of thing isn't black and white.
> I believe it's important to respect their perspective instead of insisting on a particular label.
Absolutely, but it would be nice if people expressed their wishes in logical terms. "I prefer to describe that dog as a terrier" is logically sound, "that is a terrier, not a dog" is not. The latter tries to arbitrarily redefine what a dog is.
I'd argue that one can be damaging and we should call people out on it.
Dogs are dogs and they need to be treated like dogs. The infantilization of dogs is how you get unleashed dogs getting into dog fights when it turns out that Charlie really just is another dog and should have been leashed.
I mean, it says "United Kingdom of Great Britain" on the front of my recently-issued taking-back-control-of-Britain blue passport, printed in Poland by a French company using Spanish presses and software, Italian ink, Finnish paper, and equipped with an RFID tag made in Turkey, all of whom beat out a company in Sunderland for the contract, who have since gone bust.
I think I'd liken it to the fact that -I- consider myself to be European as well as British, but there are plenty of people who clearly don't, even if arguably European is technically correct as a descriptor of all of us.
Scotland and Britain are separate countries in the UK with separate histories. No-one means the island when they talk about being British, they mean the descendants of the Britons.
Would be a nice thought, but literally nobody means the descendants of the Britons where talking about being British.
If they did, depending upon what that encompasses, then either large swathes of Scotland would be included (Glasgow is a Brythonic name!), or you'd be excluding England from the discussion.
Largely without fail, someone talking about Britain is talking of the island itself, or the current inhabitants.
The irony of a comment trying to riff on the usual "Britain isn't England" trope while getting it completely and utterly wrong, is... remarkable. You are GPT and I claim my devalued £1.
> The term "Great Britain" can also refer to the political territory of England, Scotland and Wales, which includes their offshore islands.[12] This territory and Northern Ireland constitute the United Kingdom.[13] The single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the 1707 Acts of Union between the kingdoms of England (which at the time incorporated Wales) and Scotland.
This thought occurs to me constantly. And I apply it to the other drivers too, it's pretty crazy how we got traffic and automobiles working without crashing into each other. The brain is an amazing organ.
It's also pretty amazing on a social level too. With a few obvious exceptions (certain signage, driving on the left or right side, etc.) the whole system was standardized for every adult in the entire world in something like 50 years. Everyone wanting to "get into" driving has to play by some basic rules. (And not following them is far more likely to be a mistake than intentional, at scale.)
Then I look at bees and I realize we're really not that special.
Mentally, we seem to be able to adapt well to things that we can relate to what we 'should' know about. So roads are similar to naturally occurring tracks with landmarks.
This seems to break down when we deal with things without easily appreciated analogues e.g. black holes and quantum physics.
OTOH I don't know why we can pick up driving and cycling so easily. Some people instinctively know how to countersteer an oversteering car.
> while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed
Predators are way faster than our walking speed. And the faster road is the more gentle any turn is so going 120km/h on a highway doesn't really require that much more reflex than running on twisty forest path.
> Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too.
That has nothing to do with cars, people travelled before them.
You might say "but it is bigger area" but it is also scaled up to car size. And with clear landmarks, hell, even signs telling you where you are and where to go.
That's significantly easier than going into dense forest, that also changes look based on seasons.
> I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford
Straight on at full speed and hope you manage to dodge the local nutters driving like maniacs en route.
(I did actually like Bradford in a bunch of ways but the drivers were still impressively aggressive, to the point where being a pedestrian in Italy was honestly quite a comfortable experience)
I mostly only went down there for Infest once a year, and the city centre isn't as terrifying as some of the suburbs which actually do like they were just LIDAR-scanned for some of the Fallout scenery.
On the other hand, kids that are driven to school have a much worse mental model of their surrounding neighbourhood than kids who walk or bike. The agency and feedback matters.
This strongly resonates with my memory of Marshall McLuhan and his book Understanding Media: Extensions of man; Where he defines media as any extension of ourselves or our senses. Arguing that a car (but in essence) its wheels, are extensions of our legs, and by giving us the ability to traverse further faster shaped our perception and the evolution of society.
However it's a large book and I'll have to give it a reread since this is based on a vague recollection. But it's been in my mind more and more lately, especially with all the AI hype in the news.
why would you develop such dependency on a proprietary piece of code?
> I'd even say, perhaps it's best not to tell people that their problems aren't problems to begin with. I'm not saying one should care, it'd be enough just not to explicitly dismiss on their face.
generally speaking, the opposite is true - people need to take some accountability for their problems, thanks to the disintegration of conversation people have had it too easy to simply mute or block opinions they found uncomfortable, helping them to avoid facing problems much more than it's sane to do
yep well, as far as I'm concerned they're all crap including SwiftKey esp. when compared with using a properly set-up computer
phones aren't great for input, and perhaps won't be in the foreseeable future, but using proprietary closed keyboards with no roughly-equivalent alternatives just compounds the problem
every time I want to type something substantial, in any language, I wait until I have access to a computer; it's particularly bad in Japanese and Chinese in my experience, but it's not great in any language - in Asian languages you'd get good over time with some specific system (say 4-corners, zhuyin, kana/conv, and specific predictive dictionaries) and then have support end, so why even bother?
Good reliable text to speak on mobile is quite seemless and pleasant. For instance to "type" messages or thoughts as you're biking. I used a proprietary offline one from Vivo and it was great (unfortunately the keyboard had other issues)
I'm not a native speaker but Microsoft's pinyin on windows and Google's pinyin input system on Linux both give much better results than the few open source alternatives I've tried .. so the situation is only marginally better at the desktop (I haven't tried text to speak on the desktop)
It's one of those weird areas where theyre both supposedly old solved problems - but for some reason nobody has bothered to make open source solutions
it may sound overkill, but I mostly use my own personal modifications to ibus-typing-booster for my input (formerly to ibus directly)
it works well enough for me on my computer, and i simply avoid phones for input - anything "phone" is factory-lobotomised and nothing else should really be expected, and even if the software were to suddenly be best effort, you'd still have to overcome very taxing interface limitations
this has the disadvantage of making you even less at home in other devices but hey, my reality is what when this happens I wouldn't have been any better off regardless
Yeah, those are yaks I'm not ready to shave. And I do mostly stick to voice messages on the go. But some people are allergic, so I do try to use voice-to-text then. I'm pretty sure the Ubuntu package for input method googlepinyin is entirely offline so I'm not too concerned. More just disappointed with how far behind opensource options are - when these things have been around for a decade+ and are described in textbook by this point
I would say comparing it to Musk buying Twitter is about being terminally online. Like someone bought Twitter and basically made improvements. There are a whole bunch of things he did which don't really affect how many people use or interact with the app which people hate but it's really just internet drama.
Has he? Is there evidence of this? I believe when the former head it safety left he said they were removing far more stuff than before. For example, I heard there were some child porn hashtags that got wiped out. I haven’t seen any more right wing extremists.
That's on top of Twitter previously finding that right Wong voices were already amplified far more than those on the left, which was during the peak of the right wing complaints of being silenced
It’s a free-to-download optional keyboard app that augments the perfectly adequate built in keyboard functionality of a thousand dollar device, not a prosthetic limb.
If it goes away or embeds features you don’t like, nobody is kicking your crutches away.
"In September 2022, Microsoft announced it was terminating support for the iOS version of SwiftKey. The app was removed from the App Store on October 5.[15]
In November 2022, Microsoft announced a reversal of its decision to discontinue SwiftKey for iOS devices. The app was relisted on November 18, with Microsoft promising future updates for the app. The company cited "customer feedback" as a reason for SwiftKey's return.[16]"
Assuming "customer feedback" is a euphemism for people complaining online then perhaps this is sometimes an effective strategy. These so-called "tech" companies often have no meaningfui Customer Service as they do not want to pay for it, but it seems they do pay people to monitor what is said about them online.
My $10 says the cause for reversal wasn't "customer feedback", but LLM/LM part of Microsoft realizing that they just shut down the only system-wide text-based touchpoint Microsoft ever had on iOS, just as they want to start integrating Bing/LLM everywhere.
Using Swiftkey since it's first release, it's more than being angry at online changes.
The keyboard works in such a way that it learns your typing style and then understands what you type without the requirement for actually hitting the right keys.
I can type "ky nt gromf koe stw uoi" and it will become "hi my friend how are you".
This makes typing on a phone extremely fast.
The problem is that other keyboards that claim to have similar features are not able to understand my typing gibberish.
In essence, I and many other Swiftkey users have trained ourselves to no longer be able to use any other keyboard.
Is this worth being mad over? In my opinion yes, a product loved by many being purchased by a big company who then close down support avenues is always a good reason to be mad.
I don't use my phone keyboard much, but as a programmer my keyboard definitely feels like an extension of my body, one that literally allows me to get my work done. Many craftspeople care deeply about the tools they use. I can totally see how someone would feel similarly about something like this.
Of course the keyboard is an important tool, but first of all, in this case it's not even a real keyboard, the second thing is how a lot of people constantly feel the need to behave like someone was hurting them if someone closes a bloody website. I mean, of course an keyboard can be an important tool for you, but feeling like an extension of your body is just overdramatic language, go to any construction site and ask the guys if they think their hammer or saw fells like an extension of their body, they probably look at you like you're from Mars. This whole techszene just likes to overdramtize things.
That's hardly comparable. The SwiftKey keyboard is still fully functional. Yes, you can tell it to integrate with Bing if you want and they removed a forum for feature requests. What is the big fuzz exactly?
I don't identify as handicapped, but I have RSI issues in my wrists and need a special keyboard to type. When it occasionally breaks and needs repair, I am devastated. When occasionally someone gets the idea to make a joke about it (like once someone joked about pouring wine on it) - I am not at all amused. My keyboard does feel a sort of limb.
It's called _testimony_ only iff you say it is you that are in that particular boat.
As such, I thank you for sharing your story: that requires courage for sure, and can certainly give support for any one point! If that use of qualifiers is what gives you that courage, take my apology for being so "aggressive".
I was simply suggesting to avoid generalizing, even (especially) when starting from your own experience. Your comment suggested that all the handicapped people might have the same reasons and same feelings, which I felt inappropriate.
I can't win for losing. If I state upfront that I'm x demographic -- poor, handicapped, formerly homeless, a woman -- someone will have a cow about me oversharing.* If I don't, someone will have some other issue with my observations or opinions.
Yeah, you are probably right: communication is sometimes (always?) hard, especially when only done in writing: my apologies for not seeing through your original message.
In retrospect, you didn't do anything wrong, and I read too much into it: my bad, so sorry!
People react to things differently. They also aren't complaining "about everything." They're highlighting a specific problem with a specific product and using a single exterior example to make their point.
While they had a strong reaction to this that was over the top at points, I still feel it was a worthwhile thread documenting a new problem.
They need to get off altogether rather than being terminally online or addicted to social media. In regards to this, it is very sad to see of all things, many on that site are throwing a tantrum....
...over a keyboard.
Perhaps the best solution to social media addiction is to leave altogether. The solution is not to jump from one platform to another, that just persists the outrage and the addiction.
"Welcome to the Microsoft Support Community! Thank you for your excellent question. As a Microsoft MVP (Mostly Vacuous Pinhead) I am more than happy to help with your problem. I am sure this will help:
<useless copy-pasted non-solution>
Should you need additional assistance, you may also wish to
Being terminally online and complaining about other people complaining is an even less healthy way of life, yet I keep seeing more and more of it as time goes by.
the qoute is pretty extreme when you think about it. Don't get me wrong, as I can rationalize what is being said but on the other hand, it makes me want to go outside and enjoy some sunshine.
On another note, I have just installed two alternative keyboards today to play around with. OpenBoard and AnySoftKeyboard both with some nice features.
What are you proposing? Go off the grid? It's a bit difficult when your tech overlords are forcing you on to their platforms using any trick they can. Do you realise how difficult it is to not use a smartphone, especially for young people, these days? Or perhaps you just expect people to submit to their tech overlords and accept the tools they are allowed to use?
Seen on Techmeme:
"Similarweb: in March 2023, Twitter's traffic fell 7.7% YoY, the third straight month of decline, web visitors fell 3.3% YoY, and Android app DAUs fell 9.8% YoY "
If they removed 99% of their staff I’d expect a relatively small decline in the short term. The question is in 3 years have they grown or are they down 20%?
The fact that you refer to twitter's issues in the past tense suggests that you don't use it very much. The site's bot problem is worse than ever, and I can barely view a handful of tweets on mobile before some javascript exception forces a full reload and trashes my entire state.
Yes, but Twitter used to be much more solid prior to you know, losing a lot of its work-force. Reddit, on the other hand, has improved since a few years ago
But in the push to become public the site becomes worse and worse.
First they created the "new" reddit, which is picture and ad driven. This might bring in stupid people, but kills usability and long term harms quality discussion.
Then they started to not so subtly push the new reddit: you need to go there to setup cookies, the site "accidently" turns it on like once per month, things dont work in old reddit (e.g. polls).
Now they killed i.reddit (aka .compact reddit) what kills the smooth phone experience. When I open reddit on phone now, like every page takes 5 seconds to load, then nags me to install their app, then is unreadable mess.
Since Im ranting: oh how much I miss the reddit toolbar (top comments on one part of the screen and website on other). I wish there was an addon that could emulate it - perhaps by opening two separate windows somehow and gluing them.
This is what lack of competition in a given niche makes even possible. They can afford many explicitly anti user patterns because for a bunch of usages, they have no real alternative.
When I can no longer use old.reddit I will stop giving them the little usage time I still spend there.
> When I can no longer use old.reddit I will stop giving them the little usage time I still spend there.
This is definitely just a matter of time, they're slowly moving there by killing off things like `i.`. They'll lose a bunch of "us", but overall it's probably not going to affect their bottom line. Some specific high-quality discussion subreddits dying out means nothing if there are dozens of multi-million user subreddits with generic memes or TikTok-reposts.
I've honestly not noticed a worsening of twitter's availability since the previous guys stopped being in charge. Perhaps many of the removed jobs were in non-technical areas of content moderation.
They had a ton of downtime on multiple occasions last few months. This wasn't the case in 2022 when I got on almost every day to check on the Ukraine-Russia war news.
Now I don't spend as much time on it because Twitter actively pushes its politics and hides Ukraine-Russia war content. I often check out stuff on Mastodon since it doesn't have a biased algorithm
That's interesting. "Support for the war" is not an expression that makes a lot of sense to me. Nobody in their right mind wakes up in the morning and tells themselves "yes, I am going to fight in the war just for the sake of it, I love wars", those who fight usually believe that although war is gruesome (which it is), they will be in a better shape if they continue fighting than if they just surrender to the mercy of conqueror.
Do you maybe want your country to abstain from the conflict, save money/resources and let the survival of the fittest take place? What side do you believe it will benefit?
In this context "support for the war" means, in a world where there are several awful conflicts going on at any given time, supporting active intervention in a particular conflict by giving support to one side.
For example, I support the west providing weapons to Ukraine - but I would not support a US return to Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, or an intervention in Mexico to wipe out drug cartels, or an invasion of China because of the internment of Uyghurs - even though those are all awful.
Politicians will often go as far as explicitly announcing the criteria by which they'll decide which wars to involve their country in - for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberger_Doctrine
Support for the war that Russia is waging against Ukraine to wipe it out as a nation would consist of any actions that help Russia win the war they started.
So for example anyone who is keen for Ukraine to be defeated more quickly, by opposing military assistance, are the "war supporters".
Anyone who wants to prevent the warmongers from winning and thus profiting from the war they started - those people are against the war.
No, support for a war is anything that prolongs the war, no matter which side you're arming.
You're essentially saying "it's not support for the war if I'm (perceiving I am) making sure my team wins". I'm not faulting you for that, it's the most common position, but it is support for war.
If you want to define exercise of the right of collective self-defense against aggression as “support for war”, fine, you can have your own private language.
But now explain why that, in the face of actual aggression and genocide, is a bad thing compared to the alternative?
I think you're waving at a sign saying "some things are worth war" and maybe that's true but for most things that's "support for war".
In this case there's a more important point, though, that a broad understanding that war will not be allowed to change the status quo will decrease the number of wars. Building and maintaining that understanding has the expense (sometimes) of making individual wars longer, but when it is (at worst) unclear which of those effects dominates it is unreasonable to label picking one side of that trade as unequivocal "support for war".
He's not talking about the right of the "infringed" collective to self-defense. He's saying, I think, that when you as a 3rd party enter the conflict you are adding flame to the fire.
edit: noting that I'm not trying to be pro/con a third party entering the conflict. I'm just trying to be guiltless action.
Um, no. This is Russia's war. Supporting the war would mean arming Russia.
The west has two options: 1) support genocide by letting Russia systematically invade its neighbors (we've seen this story before and the outcome is not good), or 2) support Ukraine to such a degree that ongoing war is not sustainable and Russia calls off their expansionist plans.
Matt Taibbi is hardly “far left,” and Twitter has implemented arbitrary suppression on his content because Twitter’s owner didn’t like something he said.
Twitter went from a business that moderated content based on policies, to a business that moderates content based on the day-to-day whims of an easily distracted Elon Musk. The idea that it’s somehow more open for balanced conversations now is directly contradicted by how it is actually operating.
Capricious, malicious, and selfish moderation is poisonous to a business that depends on free user-generated content.
Thanks for sharing. I think of it like a messy divorce or a business deal gone wrong. Sure some issues may be clear cut but most of the time you're never going to get the full story without listening to both sides. And even then you're not guaranteed the truth.
The problem is not that people in the West are not listening to both sides. A lot of people still have a very selective attention to what russia says. Specifically, people choose to ignore Putin's outright hitlerian speech at the start of the war, people choose to ignore prominent russian media personalities calling for ethnic cleansing in Ukraine. Just recently a horrible video of Wagner troops beheading a Ukrainian POW surfaced and Skabeeva in prime time said something to the effect "this is what should happen to all Ukrainians".
Instead, in some Chomskian myopia there is a considerable number of people in Europe and USA spreading FUD and reducing their opinion to "war is bad (sad emoji face) Ukraine shouldn't do war".
> I'm not a right wing American. I'm a European who...
Did Twitter even care about your local politics before Musk? They banned Trump, while the ayatollah, CCP etc. retrained their accounts.
Facebook was also actively censoring discussion related to American politics, while hardly noticing that a literal genocide was being coordinated on their platform in southeast Asia.
It's a huge difference. It's the difference between negligent homicide and murder. Both legal and moral thinking distinguishes between these two concepts.
It's fine to note that they are both bad and both mean culpability and liability, but pretending they are literally the same thing is the worst kind of rhetorical device.
They had been warned by locals in both Burma and Sri Lanka for many months that violent rhetoric was spreading like wildfire through users in those countries, and did nothing about it -- seldom even responding to the people pleading for them to do something.
When Sri Lanka pulled the plug on Facebook as violence was starting to erupt, Facebook did then reach out...to ask why their Sri Lankan traffic had dropped off.
This is documented in a variety of places, but for an excellent write-up of these tragedies I'd recommend The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher.
I don't know how it's possible to read Musk's twitter feed and conclude that Twitter is balanced now. The CEO exclusively interacts with and caters to right-wing accounts.
> I think if you equate "helping Ukraine defend itself against ethnic eradication" with "support an awful war" your judgement on what is a balanced debate is not reliable.
I said I support the Ukraine, but I don't believe in everything that the mainstream media is telling us. What you said there is quite a jump from what I said and exactly the type of nonsense that people would say in order to silence any meaningful debate.
I think if you believe that the support which the Ukraine gets from NATO countries is only to "help the Ukraine" and that NATO has no underlying geopolitical agenda and you don't wonder why we didn't support other nations at war with similar enthusiasm or why we never held ourselves accountable for the crimes committed in Iraq then I think your judgement on a balanced debate is not reliable. But that's okay, we both should be able to voice our thoughts and opinion and neither of us should get bombarded with replies which make us uncomfortable to debate and effective silence us.
> I don't believe in everything that the mainstream media is telling us
You're being super vague. Just say what you don't believe, out loud.
You don't believe that there's people out there calling for eradication of ukrainians? Just go on Twitter, my dude. There's even american personalities calling for it. Do you see this shit? https://twitter.com/realstewpeters/status/164670071474641305...
You don't believe "what's happening" in Ukraine? I mean, why don't you go there; it's not inaccessible, and you don't have to take up arms to do so. But fine if you don't, just.. look at people who do. There's millions of people there right now, most of them with phones, and plenty of tourists and non-tourist foreigners.
Because he is of the belief that if he doesn't explicitly say something, he can never be called out on it. He wishes to engage in criticism of others while never having to invite criticism to himself. He will sit there and tell you every single problem everything else has and why he is so rational and correct in these opinions, while offering no real solutions. Also, despite being so clear of vision and prescient of problems coming down the pipe, he's only moderately successful in that "is able to keep down a decent job and live an upper-middle-class" is successful. Which, it is, but it's hardly the resume of a world-beater.
But, as always, we tell on ourselves even with how we use language.
He always refers to Ukraine as "the" Ukraine. That itself speaks to someone who is considerably older than the Russian Federation or someone who likes to parrot the opinions of that Federation. Because Russia sees Ukraine as its territory. It is a region of Russia. But it is not. It is its own sovereign country. We don't say "the" Japan or "the" Germany or "the" Ireland.
The guy is the quintessential "enlightened centrist", finding the prevailing opinion of a place and then putting himself squarely on the opposite side "to provide balance".
It's only a jump if you deliberately ignore what russians themselves are saying.
As I've mentioned somewhere else in this thread, russian government and russian mass media outright call for ethnic cleansing. Putin in his speech at the start of the war said "that he has taken steps to finally solve the Ukrainian question". Solovyev and Skabeyeva - very prominent, prime-time media personalities - are actively promoting ideas of ethnic cleansing, like Skabeeva saying that the gruesome beheading of a Ukrainian POW by Wagner is righteous and should happen to all Ukrainians who oppose russia. Prigozhin publicly claimed that they have "killed most of the active Ukrainian male population" (which is BS) and therefore "achieved the goals of Putin's Special Military Operation." (which is an super significant statement about their intent!)
In light of this, your whataboutism is both tiresome and irrelevant, because you are outright ignoring explicit statements by one side. This is per definition unbalanced.
It is not a jump. When it comes to genocide, you are either for it or against. There is no center, no above, no neutral. The only other option is being unaware. What is being done in the west is people continuously being made aware and forced to make a choice. It's not a pleasant choice to make either way, so it's understandable that people are not happy to have to make it. But trying to carve out a neutral position where there is none, is not going to work.
It is true, we can't force people to think the way we want, nor should we want to. What we can do, hopefully, is make them live with the consequences of admitting the way they think, whatever that entails.
There are countries where it is not against the law to be a nazi, but you still get to live as a nazi.
I think US Aid should exclusively come via NATO, and in proportion to what the other NATO nations are willing to contribute., hell I would even accept a 2:1 contribution (meaning for every $1 or every Missile other NATO members contribute the US gives 2... )
The world complains about the US being the "world police" until they want us to spend all of our resources to defend them...
US Aid to Nato is an investment in global economic stability that is repaid via increased commerce. It is a long term investment and it has paid off time after time.
First I disagree with using per capita numbers, that is in improper way to judge this type of thing.
However even if we look at the percapita number, the US out spend all other nato nations. Between January 24 and November 20, 2022, NATO members committed at least 75.2 billion euros of that 47.8 came from the US.
Per Capita for that period breaks down as
US: 142 Euros / citizen
UK: 117 Euros / Citizen
Canada: 96 Euros / Citizen
Germany: 70 Euros / Citizen
France: 21 Euros / Citizen
Germany would have to 2 double their per capita contributions just to match the US.
Great you omitted the big spenders, and picked France and Germany who have been stepping on the break from the beginning. If you don't like per capita we can do % of GPD where the US doesn't even break in to the top ten. Unsurprisingly the biggest member of nato (by far) has given the biggest bag of money. But US is nowhere near being the most committed nations.
Bucha is ethnic eradication. Irpen is ethnic eradication. Prigozhin saying that they have "eradicated most of the active male population of Ukraine and therefore achieved the goals of the war" is a straight up confession.
Just because russia's strategy is ethnic eradication through assimilation does not make it less ethnic eradication.
I get that there’s strong vested interests trying to discredit him. But “selective editing” doesn’t describe the dozens (hundreds?) of videos he filmed when the Federal courthouse in Portland was under siege and he was routinely attacked by the masked terrorists trying to burn down the building.
Does it surprise me that his detractors would claim he is “neo-nazi-friendly”? Not in the slightest. The “anti-fascists” routinely claim the people they brutalize are fascist nazis - it’s a form of projection / deflection.
A per pro of nothing, I believe strongly that all online identities created towards the end of 2022 should be subject to a 'human verification test'. Just in case. Not sure how it would work, but just suggesting it might be useful/valuable.
Why end of 2022? It's kind of an ongoing problem. And one that Musk has very much failed to deal with; someone I follow has a different crypto-spam bot reply to every single post they make!
The end of 2022 is when the tools gained enough mass exposure, and more critically ease of use, that anyone anywhere could set up an account, and start creating 'humans' for future use. Before then, it was a specialist task, so much less common I think.
From now on (Day G1?), we're going to be awash with AI written stuff. Literally drowned in it. The first AI drafted marketing emails have already started hitting my inbox, and that's just the start I guess.
Probably for the same reason people feel the need to complain about people complaining... and then complain about people complaining about people complaining, and so on.
Analysis is the most straightforward path to resolving disagreement. Get enough people talking and you'll have disagreement. The immediate result is analysis.
I was responding to the question, "why do we feel the need to pick everything apart?", not this other comment. I'd point out your response was an analysis of the use of the term "irony" in online discourse.
Are tech companies that desperate that they need to do this? Maybe if it was bigger company, but this can't be a threat to Microsoft....They're all acting like starving rats feeding on their children.
That's the problem with bigger companies, usually there is a perfectly good explanation in the context of the company but we will never hear about it. Could be as simple as the person who moderated that forum being laid off.
Microsoft does this stuff. Like forcing Minecraft accounts to migrate onto MSFT accounts, which locked out a lot of older players by requiring the original email address used to be verified. There's no use in complaining about it; you should just anticipate that MSFT ruins everything it touches and get ready to switch.
The people who can fix user complaints and business disparities like this in Fortune 500 companies do not care because 1) they can't see them, and 2) they are actively incentivized to not care about it.
All it needs is one of them doing that, then all others must follow to remain competitive, if not just for being able to put the same bullet points in products advertising.
I used Swiftkey until recently, but the delay on bringing up the keyboard was annoying me too much. I couldn't justify changing phones just because of SwiftKey so instead I just went back to the default Google keyboard.
I'm still adapting weeks after changing, the most annoying issue is that the Japanese keyboard on Gboard has the key layout a bit different that the English one, so I cannot touch type on it like I did before.
The features that kept me on swift key is that is multilanguage, Google keyboard you have to switch to the correct language beforehand. I'm pretty worried that SwiftKey is now doing big nonos like sending my data around, but Google keyboard is absolutely unfit for my usage.
Gboard does have multi-language now. In fact, I think it's better at that, simply because SwiftKey obsessively capitalizes the word i, even if you try to delete that suggestion. That's one of the main reasons I recently switched away from it, plus the fact that if you put the cursor in the middle of a word SwiftKey moves out to the end, and the fact that SwiftKey frequently hangs for several seconds in the work profile.
Google Keyboard is multilanguage too, if you mean having multiple languages active at the same time and the swiping/hints responding to both. I'm currently typing this comment using it.
Microsoft deleted the public support forum for Office365 software like Powerpoint online: a product that makes money. Of course those who pay are rarely the primary users, so why hear their voice…
Oh dear, I literally just had a dream last night about how MS was gonna build GPT into the keyboard and even in my dream I thought "what a complete lack of reflection that must have taken, to think this is a good idea."
Guess I'm on the search for a new keyboard as well then. le sigh...
What a predictive keyboard does is exactly what GPT does and vice versa, so it makes a whole lot of sense to use it. A predictive keyboard is an even more direct application of GPT than ChatGPT is.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if current keyboards implemented some kind of a GPT-light network. It is just the perfect tool for the job.
Ive had Bing integrated into my keyboard for about a week now and it's not a big deal. I see a Bing logo at the top next to the "GIF" button, and that's it. If I don't press it, it's like it isn't even there.
I'd go further and say that they're actually the bane of my existence when I'm looking for help/pointers on, for example, Windows issues. Inevitably somebody will have posted the same issue on one of the public Windows support forums, but the only responses will be completely low value and irrelevant nonsense[0] from the swarm of numbskulls who seem to inhabit these places. Almost never do I actually find any useful information, but these places pollute the first page, sometimes the first few pages, of search results on Google et al. Very frustrating.
[0] E.g., suggesting that the user needs to completely reinstall Windows to fix an issue that could be dealt with by a simple registry hack, or similar.
Samsung keyboard on my phone (because I'm already forced to trust that software). SimpleKeyboard on the kids' tablets because it's OSS. Neither is as good as Swiftkey but security is not binary.
They want you to use Gboard instead, but the functionality is worse. I don't get it.
Google Pinyin Input made it very easy to enter punctuation, by doing a minor downward swipe on the virtual key associated with the symbol you want. (You can also swipe up on keys to quickly produce capital letters.) On Gboard, as far as I can tell, you have to do a long press instead, which is a gigantic pain.
I resorted to pulling the apk off my old phone and manually installing it on my new phone, but this feels ridiculous.
Can anyone recommend (a) a pinyin input method that doesn't force you to long press for punctuation, or (b) a setting I've overlooked in any major input method that removes the insane long press requirement?
What's exactly going on? As a user who never used SwiftKey and only know that it's a mobile 3rd party keyboard, I'm kind of lost what's the issue about. ELI5?
Just don't accept the TOS that are presented to you when you click the Bing button. Also, you can just hide that whole bar with the >< button on the left
You aren't in control of your smartphone. Microsoft/Google are. The FSF have been saying this for decades. It doesn't matter how "open source" Android is. It's not designed to put you in control.
I've been fighting for probably a full decade at this point to get Swiftkey to stop turning "ok" into "OK" and making me look like either a geriatric or a lunatic. It doesn't matter how many times I tell it to stop predicting it it keeps happening.
Similarly: I cannot convince Swiftkey to stop correcting "whole" into "whore". L and R are next to each other on the Dvorak layout, so I get it, but it does not matter how many times I tell it to never correct to whore, it for some reason always prefers that over whole...
It is baffling to me that they have the "don't predict this" button that clearly doesn't actually do that. It has behaved this way forever, so it must be behaving as intended or else they would've fixed it by now. But I can't puzzle out what that button is actually intended to do.
FOSS community would fork a good product in case the original author/maintainer selling it to Big Corp, which would decide to mess it up to stuff their new tech down users' throats.
If you are a heavy smartphone user, particularly if you happen to fall into the age gap between too young to think voice control and answering machine messages are super awesome future things and too old to have grown up with video messages, there is no "just a keyboard". You'll be so adapted to the particular behavior of your chosen smartphone keyboard that changing would be like an involuntary migration to dvorak. Or perhaps even worse, because there's so much more to interactive touchscreen keyboard behavior than just layout. (written on swype, because I haven't found any replacement that did not feel like losing a limb)
It feels to me like there is a market opportunity for a new keyboard app manufacturer here. Possibly along similar ethical lines as Mozilla/Firefox (there's bundled stuff because someone has to pay the bills, but it's only so much effort to turn it off).
I was the PM for a keyboard app with millions of downloads and was the most downloaded keyboard app in India. But there is no way to monetize it.
Early on, the OEMs would pay us to have our keyboards in their images as it would give them more customizability, better local language support and end-to-end localization. The rev share on each device sold, was enough to keep the product funded.
But post 2014, the OEMs started asking for fees to add our keyboard into their images. And instead of positive funds, we started to go into negative and had to pivot away from being just a keyboard.
Anyway, right now there is not much market opportunity in this space. Maybe with AI being ubiquitous, a new wave of keyboard apps will come in - but again right now the economics don't make sense.
I'm afraid I must agree with your experience on the revenue opportunities angle.
I wish we were in a world where several good keyboards on mobile, like shells/terminals on desktop, existed just for the sake of making the world a better place and none of them needed integrating with Ads/Search Engines/AI etc. for the sake of generating revenue.
Even better, I wish we lived in a world where the programmers of such tools were well paid for their services, whether through philanthropy or government grants or something else.
Our keyboard was free to the end users and we made our money from OEMs giving us a few cents for each device that came with our keyboard as a default app.
We also had a pro version, but as our app was focused on the Indian market, and the Indian users were not big on paid apps back in early 2010s, there's wasn't much revenue in that either.
I'm really surprised there are no quality swipe keyboard options out there. Gboard is ok. I liked SwiftKey better a few years ago, but it degraded. But I'd pay for a swipe keyboard which solves a few issues I run into all the time: like not being great at detecting the space swipe, not showing the word alternatives consistently, not getting stuck in password entry mode, etc.
I tried a few of the available options and it seems like gboard and SwiftKey on top, then a huge chasm, then every other option, few of them likely low quality data stealers.
