Third Party Keyboards in the Middle of the Night

Bit of a headache so I was finding it difficult to sleep. Got up to take a pill ? and have a look at my computer. Loving the Swiping Swype way of writing. It’s a great way to type quickly on the virtual keyboards. You don’t have to be that accurate with finding the keys as you Swype. The software behind it makes good guesses at what you wanted. Sometimes you have to choose one of the three alternatives given but it’s still excellent at knowing which word you wanted. I still prefer to use dictation but there are times when you have to be silent and third party keyboards are the answer.

The third party keyboards of this type I’ve tried are Swiftkey, Swype and Fleksy. Possibly another I can’t remember the name of which had you swiping with both hands. I think the letters on the keyboard were even somehow hidden. It didn’t work for me anyway. I was flabbergasted by how the AI of Swiftkey was able to predict the next words for me. I showed the software blogs I’d written and other texts so it learned my vocabulary. I’m using Swype these days but I’ll give Swiftkey another try.

?Making HDR Photos

I’ve been working on my HDR photos because I bought the Aurora HDR software. I already have Photomatix which is good but I think this Aurora is easier and better to use. The pictures I’m making are better images and less harsh. There is the influence from Trey Ratcliffe who is the master of the HDR style photo art in Aurora. In iColorama it is possible to get HDR effects but there’s nothing like using bracketed photos in a full on HDR editor on the Mac. Even so, with Aurora you can get great HDR photos using just a single RAW photo. There is just so much information in that type of photo format.

I’ve typed this last paragraph in with SwiftKey and I’m liking Swype better. Maybe I just need to persevere with this one for a bit longer. I do like the usage starts you get with SwiftKey. It tells me how much more productive I’m being and how many typos if has fixed for me. Have you tried any third party keyboards?

Disadvantages of third party keyboards

I like to dictate and you lose this functionality with third party keyboards. All is not lost though, with using Drafts app for inputting text you can do both. This is because Drafts has dictation built in though the actions.

When you get a word wrong you have to go back and do it again, there are two ways of doing this. In Swype the backspace will first of all delete the whole word, unless you tap on the dying area first. Then you can go back a letter at a time. Using SwiftKey it goes back letter by letter straight away. Sometimes it is better one way and sometimes better the other. I think I prefer Swype for that feature.

I wonder if one day Apple will make a swiping keyboard and Sherlock all the third party keyboards of this type? Probably not, but you never know.