Are you seriously telling me that iPhone users have been typing this whole time? Man, I’m just… I’m sorry.
Is it actually any good? I tried out SwiftKey when iOS 8 came out, and it was horrible. Buggy as all hell.
I’ve been using Swype since iOS 8 launch day. It’s decent. Still a lot of bugs for them to work out, but it works the majority of the time. Bugs are of the I’m-Swyping-but-nothing’s-coming-up-in-the-text-box variety for the most part. It often covers up the bottom few messages in the iMessage app instead of pushing them to the visible top part of the screen, which can be annoying. Weirdly, the App Store review function doesn’t work with Swype–the Swype keyboard appears, but the rest of the screen goes blank until you switch back to the regular keyboard. I have a vague recollection from my Android days that there used to be a couple of extra punctuation keys for commonly used punctuation marks. Those are not on the iOS version, but I may be misremembering their existence anyway…
Even with those annoyances, I find it’s worth it because it’s so much faster and easier (and more fun) than the Apple keyboard.
Exactly. I thought they’d been doing it for a while until I heard about it as a new thing. Ridiculous.
SwiftKey was pretty much unusable. Permissions errors where it would tell me I needed to give it permission or it couldn’t do predictive text, then I go and check and IT HAS PERMISSION. So I just gave up and went back to normal. My iPhone is my work phone, I don’t use it for that much typing, more checking of emails any way. I just wanted to make it more in line with my personal phone’s (an Android) typing experience. I’ll give it a shot again in a while, once they’ve had a chance to iron out some more kinks.
I’ve yet to really be impressed by swype. It seems like the time it takes to make sure it got the word right loses you all the time you gain on lifting and lowering your fingers.
I tried both Swype and Swiftkey when they first came out for iOS 8. I found Swiftkey to be much better at interpreting my swipes accurately into words, and provided better suggestions in the predictive box areas. So that’s what I’ve stuck with. My only problem with it is that there is no microphone on the keyboard, so if I want to do speech-to-text I have to shuffle through my keyboards. Oh, and Swiftkey wasn’t working for the iPad, only the phone. Maybe it’s available now?
I’ve found the alternative keyboard support on iOS8 to be completely half-arsed. There are all sorts of stupid glitches, from typing that doesn’t appear, to keyboards that don’t appear, to crashing keyboards. And old apps that haven’t been updated can crash when you try to pop up any keyboard, even the standard one. It’s been a huge disappointment.
I got it and ran into the issues others have mentioned. For now, it’s just easier to use the built in keyboard. But when Swype improves, I’ll give it another shot.
About time. Alternative keyboards has been the last major feature that made me stick with Android (despite the much more common bugs) over the last few phone upgrades, I need to email far too often to have to manually type everything. I might have to reconsider switching back to iOS next upgrade.
I’FormsLikeDiscourse.sUpOnHeavilyAjaxedWebFirmsSwype, ButForSureReasonItTotallyScrewallyHookedIn
I’m totally hooked, but for some reason it totally screws up on some heavily ajaxed web forms, like Discourse.
Now, my regular Android keyboard “Swypes”, though not as nicely.
The only thing that ever made me jealous of Android, oh and maybe better cell radios in the non-apple made phones.
I use swiftkey on android, and it works really well. On the ios8, however, i’ve discovered that voice recognition is incredibly good, much better than the previous iteration. Now i just have to habituate myself to hitting the microphone button any time i would normally start typing.
Started using Swype on my Nokia Symbian-based phones and have been using it on all of my Android devices – my tablet with a crappy 3rd party rom is the only one that has some problems.
The wife doesn’t want to try it on her iPhone – 'cause reasons…
Sounds like one major bug:
via @OtherMichael’s baby:
BoingBoingHufferBot on Twitte
Welcome to 2010 iOS users. If only you could get the Google Keyboard to replace it when it starts acting weird in 9 months or so…
Can you bittorrent stuff with your ithing? Hows about that TOR?
Thanks for playing 
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