g what? I only know Heliboard
If you happen to have a bingo in your hand, this comment is a free mark in the “this is why foss apps are better” spot. Though you have probably seen one already.
I’ve been following Google’s material 3 since its release. There’s pretty good examples of it, like the calculator app, but half of google’s own apps don’t follow their own guidelines, and they keep making changes to stray away and make their designs even uglier. Gboard was one of the final hopes for google’s design. this better be a bug or something
Try giving us back a fucking physical keyboard. Touchscreens fucking suck.
I disagree, but to each their own. You do have a potential option here:
I’d really love a modern smartphone with a t9 keypad. I used to be able to type almost as fast on t9 as on a real keyboard. I miss it so much.
There’s an app for that
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.sspanak.tt9
It’s not as good as a physical numpad, but it gets the job done
Thanks! The lack of a tactile board is a lot of the problem though
Kinda reminded me of this post
https://feddit.org/post/8032101
Albeit the kerning on those virtual keys are making me all itchy. Horrible horrible implementation from Google yet again when they could’ve done it right.
For about a decade now google has been changing shit for no particular reason, this is just the latest.
They learned it from Microsoft.
I haven’t used Microsoft software for 25 years or so, so I don’t have any reference point, but there was a time when Google lead the pack in innovation, that’s no longer the case.
Google lead the way at buying innovation.
Mhm.
Innovate, Dominate, Stagnate, Enshittify.
Classic tech company lifecycle.
Basically, they have nothing else to do, so they just throw shit at the wall to see what sticks.
Sticky touchscreen for haptic feedback?
Sir, you earned yourself an extra piss break!
That’s just their way they keep it alive. If it were actually good, Google would cancel it.
One thing I did notice a while back, was seeing the 2022ish interface for YouTube and Google search and feeling how dated it was, still absolutely usable mind you, just clearly with a design ethos from an older era.
Most the time, I feel that changes Google make are absolutely arbitrary, rounding a button and then squaring it again, but I need to give them credit that there is something more, something about staying at the forefront of GUIs. It’s still all bullshit of course, the old one looks older but is identically useful.
The reason is their internal promotion culture. You cant get promoted without global impact, so buckle up we are changing things so we can get promoted not because it’s better.
That’s got to be the absolute worst KPI I’ve ever heard of.
It’s a KPI you develop in the 00s culture of move fast and break things when the competition is at your heels and you want to be at theirs. You want to be the search engine that made the email client everyone uses otherwise that email client might make a search engine everyone uses…
It was outdated in the mid 10s, and it’s the mid 20s now
God how many things have changed on my phone that I did not ask them to. Changing the font on the clock. Changing the lock screen layout. REMOVING FROGGY WEATHER BEING BACK FROGGY YOU FUCKS.
Marketing and design teams just have to justify their existence. Makes for annoying stupid changes.
Don’t get me started.
Gmail for business has been renamed at least four times.
Google Home changed layout for no particular reason and made everything an extra click away.
Google Assistant removed perfectly working actions, try turning on your A/C at 3am in the morning whilst you’re sleeping.
Android changes navigation modes making everything worse.
Gmail keeps changing its layout.
Google Admin moves sections around for no reason.
Google search returns worse results every week.
Google Gemini is infecting every service.
Google Sites removed simple blogging functionality without any alternative.
Free services for life are now paid.
Google Play moved the search button to the bottom but you still have to tap at the top to type your search, so it’s just an extra click.
It still requires the extra click, but if you hit the search icon again then your keyboard will pop up. So no need to move your finger up top, Spotify’s search has the same setup.
maybe the idea is that round keys will have less typos than rectangular keys that are all touching each other?
They are most likely running an A/B test on exactly those metrics.
We’ll know if it’s successful if they roll it out in the end.
Hopefully with the more available space between the keys, then there will be less typos.
I type with my thump cause I like to use my phone one handed but I get a lot of typos due to that.
Florisboard beta keyboard lets you increase that available space even further by decreasing the letter size. It’s still missing other features tho, like word suggestions, auto correct etc.
I like this. But this should be an option.
Heliboard is the best right now
Is it better than FUTO?
I hadn’t heard of this one before; but a search of the play store is giving zero results. This one require side-loading?
You can install it with fdroid.
idk I prefer florisboard more in general
but currently they don’t have any autocorrect or swipe typing
It really is. Funny enough, I use the rounded style icons.
I wish there were a different gesture typing library to use… It makes so many annoying incorrect predictions.
Reminds me of this
I wanna switch to FOSS alternatives but swiping is either funky (FUTO) or not available for now (Floris). I ended up downgrading gboard to an older version since all this boat (especially the bitmoji sticker nonsense) really grinds my gears.
Did you try Heliboard? It can be setup to swipe, though I mostly tap type. When i have used the swipe it has worked well though. I have been using it for over a year now and really like it.
Get Heliboard and then download a gesture library such as this: https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard/blob/master/app/src/main/jniLibs/arm64-v8a/libjni_latinimegoogle.so
Heliboard is on F-Droid.
Oh my gosh, I don’t think info like this is found anywhere on the internet, thank you.
Thank you so much internet stranger. Just made the switch!
Swiping seems to work fine on Heliboard (I guess because it uses the same proprietary library as gboard)
See, I guess my problem is I never liked gboard’s swipe algorithms back when I used gboard. Cause man heliboard’s swiping with the gboard library really pisses me off sometimes lol
Gboard is so far the only one i know that actually works with my use case. Swiping with multiple languages active at once, and actually figuring out what I want to type.
I’m running it without Google services or network access.
SwiftKey also does this!
I really, really want to switch to a less, uh, commercial keyboard but none of the ones typically praised here (for good reason) support multilingual swiping.
I switched to Heliboard and I couldn’t be more happier! It is just as good as any proprietary keyboards.
Don’t use gboard, rather download a keyboard from F-Droid and avoid the keylogging :-)
Which one do you use? I haven’t found one that works as well as the Google one yet
I’ve been using FUTO which is free and open source, has pretty good gesture typing, very good voice to text, and does not connect to the internet. I’m happy with it, but I’m also an idiot and most things make me happy.
FUTO which is free and open source
It is neither free (as in freedom), nor open source).
It is source-available.
I stand corrected.
For the love of Christ how do I change the FUTO dictionary to recognize curse words?? It’s so unnecessarily puritan
Just open the main settings and there’s a category called personal dictionary.
HeliBoard is pretty nice
For anyone like me who is still hanging on to gboard for swipe,
I forgot until now you could download a swipe library for heliboard Here by picking raw and then uploading it to heliboard in advanced settings>load gesture typing library.
Thank you, I reinstalled Heli after your comment.
Simple keyboard. I went minimalistic
FUTO keyboard, Seriously, it’s way better than every other option I’ve looked into. Has material you design support.
Also a l lot of cool in development features like on-device text correction and speech to text with local LLM processing.
Futo is great unless you constantly switch between several languages. 🥲
idk 2 klicks to switch a language works well enough for me with futo.
🤮
