I’ve been working on this for a few days, let me know what you think.
I should have it up on f-droid shortly, but here’s the release on github if anyone wants to help test it.
that’s hella cool! it’s the first open-source alt keyboard app I’ve seen
if you’re open for suggestions, I have some for the layout:
1- I believe it is a easier gesture to swipe from inside to outside than outside to inside. So a better placement for M might be swipe left, for example. Not just to be easier but also to avoid your fingers to hit at each other.
2- Maybe gestures for some common bigrams would be good, for example: swiping from T in direction to H could reproduce ‘th’.
3- I think it is preferable to not include common consonants in the right column. A better typing flow for phone would be with a high hand variation, D and L in the same side of vowels might make you type some words with low hand variation. e.g. the word “should”.
4- This is the most radical suggestion, but I believe a even number of columns is better than odd. Because the middle column might be confusing sometimes for some users as they have to choose which finger to use to press the keys in there, which would not happen with a 4x3 grid.
anyway, i’m so glad to see some love for alt keyboard layouts for phone! I will keep testing that one for sure! hoping for the best :)
also: the multi space for punctuation is awesome!
Thanks!
I’d totally be up for adding accepting a PR for an alternative layout based on those design choices if you’d like. I’ll try to have a guide for how to do that within the next day or so, people are asking for this to add other languages.
4- This is the most radical suggestion, but I believe a even number of columns is better than odd. Because the middle column might be confusing sometimes for some users as they have to choose which finger to use to press the keys in there, which would not happen with a 4x3 grid.
I actually tested a 4 column layout in multi-ling-o, because I thought it could be useful (then you would need very few swipes). Boy was I wrong… it increased the hunting-and-pecking factor by a lot, and was so much more difficult. There’s something psychologically natural-feeling about the 3x3 grid with a center hub-key, that makes things much faster.
I have built the code in a way that makes more columns possible tho.
I think privacy is a serious issue but I’m not sure if this the right solution. Google keyboard is just much faster.
It’s a misconception that ppl can only acheive high words per minute with those spying keyboards. Lots of messageease users have speeds of over 50 words per minute. After using this for three days only, I’m up to about 35 wpm, and I suspect it’ll get a lot better within the next month as the key positions get fixed into my muscle memory.
