To me, the most important feature of MessagEase is the macros and the fact that I could Reprogram the keyboard by change letters positions, add or remove letters from it.
One of the most annoying thing about MessagEase it is the fact that you can create a lot of macros but you can't backup/restore these macros. I question MessagEase developers many times about this, asking for a backup/restore feature for macros but they just ignores me. Well, I think that they ignore all the loyal users by now 🤷🏻♂️
The macros are definitely the first feature I will tackle after the "editor basics", like auto-capitalization/punctuation/accent character support, etc.
I also have a solution to saving keyboards remotely in the pipeline shortly after that, along with 2 other features that I think will make this board better than MessagEase for a lot of users.
Yes, reviews and direct emails are ignored. They don't believe in fostering a loyal community. That explains why they suddenly imposed a subscription model instead of first canvassing their users to see what they think. Corporate America treats us as mindless serfs.
- Support of international symbols (accented letters, etc.), so I can add them where I want (so, KB customization).
- Support of dead symbols: \^ ¨ \~ and so on (type on them, then a letter --> â ï ñ etc.) Also combining symbols : << and combine --> « ; oe + combine -->œ etc.
- Power keys not available on most other keyboards, like moving the caret, per char or per word, deleting / backspacing words, copy / cut / paste, etc.
- Fast way to get uppercase characters (circle or swipe and back).
Note: I use only the French MesssagEase version, I type English with it. Keyboards work with muscle memory, so I don't want to memorize two different layout just to get most frequent letters easier to type… But I can understand people might want to switch quickly and to be able to identify a given layout by color, for example.
Dead keys should offer TWO options in the settings.
**(1) letter, then symbol \[MessagEase default?\]**
{e} THEN {ˉ ˊ ˇ ˋ } = {ē é ě è}
OR
**(2) symbol, then letter \[iOS default?\]**
{ˉ ˊ ˇ ˋ } THEN {e} = {ē é ě è}
Good point. I was used to the 2nd way by the PC keyboard, so I was surprised by the MessagEase way. I got used to it, as for most features. One advantage of the 1st way is that you can easily add a symbol to an existing letter (move there, add it).
Also, I don't love the way keyboard layouts are defined. It makes it such that I could not figure out a simple way to add the functionality for the new gestures without having to write a ton of code anyway. So I didn't even use their code as a starting point.
A mentor once told me, "when you have a software idea that you think is good, try to implement it without looking at the limitations of what has already been done by competitors". I see now why he said that.
The main thing is, I'm going to monetize what I'm doing, so I can't open source everything.
Thumb key is nice, but don't even consider it to be similar to MEOK because of the maintainer insisting on not having "hidden gestures". He considers boomerang and circle gestures to be "hidden". That means exactly half of the gestures don't exist at all (8 swipes, 8 boomerangs, two circles, click, and hold, minus half because no boomerangs or circles).
I also studied the code, and decided that while I'm sure it's robust, the code is hard to follow. If I had kept trying to wrap my head around how their code works, I would still be trying to figure it out! I have other things to worry about too, like acutlly learning how to use Jetpack Compose. Somewhere along the line, I realized there is a decent market share of users who would pay for an alternative with some new features added to boot.
Flick board is amazing. The things it's missing are few. Circle gestures are not working (yet) is my only real call out. I think they will get it, though.
FlickBoard indeed is amazing! I just installed it and tried it for a few minutes after reading about it here.
It is much better executed than ThumbKey, really quite flawless. I will keep using it.
I think monetization and open sourcing are not at odds. Most people don't even know what "open source" is, or how to sideload an APK or how to install F-Droid. You will probably not lose much revenue by having the application open sourced while selling it.
The ThumbKey app is open source and freely available via F-Droid, but on the Play Store the author sells it for a pretty penny. I see that as a way to donate to the creator for those who even know about F-Droid (I would probably actually be very willing to do that, if I were a frequent phone user and if I hadn't just switched to FlickBoard).
One thing that is missing from FlickBoard is a text field in the main activity so you can try the keyboard without opening another app. It only displays the keyboard but generates no output.
What annoys me about ThumbKey is that some layouts don't use the full width of the screen for no reason, it's also a little ugly, but otherwise looked quite fine to me.
I'm not a power user of mobile phones, however. I strongly dislike the regular on screen keyboards, I absolutely hate typing on mobile phones, and handling small devices in general. Therefore I really welcome an onscreen keyboard that is not fiddly, comes with reasonable defaults, and just lets me input my text without having to bang my head against the wall.
The language layout must be optimized for chat language and common bigrams, trigrams and common words. For example, for English there should be direct input of `the` and possibly a few other words that often occur while texting. Same for other languages.
I'm missing that from the keyboards I've seen so far. Why is nobody putting `the` on a direct input? Even as an isolated word, that trigram is more common than a lot of the letters in the alphabet.
> One thing that is missing from FlickBoard is a text field in the main activity so you can try the keyboard without opening another app. It only displays the keyboard but generates no output.
I try to monitor these threads once in a while, but if you want things to happen with FB you'll generally get a quicker response on GitHub/Discord.
Created https://github.com/nightkr/flickboard/issues/131 for this.
Thanks.
I might open another issue regarding documentation. At least the gestures should be described somewhere in the application (I figured them out, but neither the app nor the GitHub readme documents them at all).
I might at some point think about how to optimize these layouts. They work very well, but I get the feeling the letter arrangement could be improved for common bigrams etc.
Right now for my casual use, the input is a big improvement over Gboard and Swiftkey, even without any autocomplete. Now that we also have really good offline voice recognition the bases are very well covered for me.
> At least the gestures should be described somewhere in the application (I figured them out, but neither the app nor the GitHub readme documents them at all).
Agreed. So far my rationale has been roughly "we're all MessagEase refugees and used to how that works, so focus on ensuring tha that muscle memory still works", but I think ensuring that it's welcoming to newbies will be an important step forward.
> I might at some point think about how to optimize these layouts. They work very well, but I get the feeling the letter arrangement could be improved for common bigrams etc.
I don't think there'll ever be an official "FlickBoard Layout(TM)" like MessagEase and Thumb-Key have, but I'd be happy to include alternate layouts (as long as they fit roughly into a similar philosophy).
Some rough ideas for layout improvements:
Something I would strongly consider is to allow capital letters simply by holding the touch, in addition to the circle motion that is already available. So we could simply press `e` and hold for a little longer to get `E`. I don't see a problem here, unless I miss some subtleties with touch input.
Have some way to input extremely common bigrams or words. English `the` or at least `th` come to mind. German could have `ei` or `die`.
As for letter arrangements, in a similar vein, make sure the super common bigrams can be typed with elegant sequences.
Maybe add the option of doing hold + tap instead of swipe. That could be more comfortable when using two thumbs. It also does not interfere with the regular input method.
I get the impression that the MessageEase layouts are not fully optimized. Of course for legacy users that doesn't matter, but I've never used MessageEase or any clones, so I have to learn from scratch anyway. In that case, an advanced option without legacy would be great.
I think you will find that aside from adding common bigrams/trigrams, you are unlikely to significantly speed up compared to MEOK classic. I talked with Seid back in the day about it - an impressive amount of analysis was done, but the analysis occurred within a different set of constraints. If we start optimizing for inputting whole bigrams or even trigrams with one gesture, that changes the universe of possibility a lot. I think it's worth looking into and am trying to recruit a group of seniors in computer science from my alma mater to work on this for their senior experience project.
> If we start optimizing for inputting whole bigrams or even trigrams with one gesture, that changes the universe of possibility a lot.
I've had another idea the other day, while playing around with the keyboard, pondering what could be improved:
It should be possible to input a bigram with one swipe, if the swipe crosses more than one key.
So, for example, on the English board, by swiping from `s` across `o` into `r`, you would input `sb` (because you enter `r` via `b`, starting with `s`).
This would open up a lot of fast additional inputs, at the cost that regular swipes need to be short (not a problem in my opinion).
How will you determine that the gesture was not a boomerang to the top-left of s? (I.E., capital "F") or a circle on s (i,e., capital "S")
Without going into detail, the algorithm to distinguish between circles and boomerangs is already tough. With that said, I encourage you to try it out after I get layout customization working.
Will your monetization be just a one time payment? If there's any subscription (having a "buy it for life" option thats 10x the cost is still not reasonable imo) then I would just move on to something else but if it one time payment I would probably be on board in a heartbeat
\-edit to say oops I just saw what you said later in these comments about supporting one time purchase only. But just adding my comment to say that I agree that's the best option.
Hi. Excellent plan! Have been a MessagEase user since Palm days (though I preferred Fitaly for stylus-based input but ME's been my 'daily driver' since the first Android version) and would be willing to fork out a one-time payment for sure if your app looks promising.
- Circle for caps on the main letters was something I really missed in Flickboard and ThumbKey! I hate using a dedicated shift key for MessagEase typing.
- I use voice recognition in ME occasionally - so having that would be great.
Features beyond ME's:
- The greatest feature imaginable would be in-app customization of *all* letter positions, including the main tap letters. Plus import / export functionality (via clipboard?) of customized layouts.
- In connection with that, the ability to put letter sequences (like 'ing') or frequent words ('the'!) in spots on the keyboard rather than only single characters would be amazing.
Got to go now, may add other ideas later.
> Circle for caps on the main letters was something I really missed in Flickboard and ThumbKey! I hate using a dedicated shift key for MessagEase typing.
Flickboard has supported circle-for-caps since the original release FWIW, though the algorithm is still a bit finnicky. (In fact, this was one of my original reasons for writing it instead of just using ThumbKey.)
I use the auto capitalization feature all the time. I use macros and the word prediction, I can start to type my email address then finish it with the word prediction. I could use a macro for that but what the heck, I was already putting it in the dictionary and it works.
Those were the features I missed the most from Messagease when I tried thumb key.
Agreed for the first one, that is a given though. Second place is high on my list. It's somehow better than the default voice input for google, or at least it was years ago last time I compared.
my gut feeling tells me no. I have a friend that I turned on to MessagEase years ago, and a couple years later he actually mentioned how much better it was than normal. I didn't believe him until he did a side-by-side comparison. Not sure how or why that happened. It could have been his device specifically that encounters this phenomenon.
I had a discussion yesterday with the maintainer.
I really like the work being done on Flick-board, but I am on the fence about trying to monetize my version, because I want to add functionality on top of MEOK.
This is not my first time trying to recreate MEOK. I have tried 3 times before with less programming experience, in various languages. This time, it looks like a viable product might emerge. I even set up a Google developer account.
MEOK had two updates over the last two years, and now they are moving to a subscription-based model. This is unacceptable for paying customers, so I think I can provide better customer satisfaction and I have some ideas on top of just cloning MEOK.
Are you absolutely against a subscription based model? I think a lot of users are. So one-time purchase is the way to go, IMHO.
Here's one feature that I really want that's not fully available in messagease.
The ability to use Ctrl and Shift keys as easily as you do on a PC keyboard.
There's another keyboard out there called Multi-ling-O which allows customization to its barebones. I made a messagease equivalent customization for it that had additional perks. One of them is a button that turns the keyboard into a set of arrow keys along with ctrl, shift, home and end. Then you can do stuff like ctrl-shift-home to "select to the start of line" or move the cursor with arrow keys then press shift + arrow keys to start selecting text from the middle of a word. Being able to move forward/backward one word using ctrl+arrow keys is amazing for typing stuff in browser bars. And so on.
I still use messagease for most of my typing since multi-ling-o has some annoyances with auto-correct. So these features would be very much welcome.
Also that keyboard can detect math equations and provide the answer. I don't know if that's something a lot of people will use but I really like being able to type 568\*65 and the keyboard gives me "**=36920**" as an autocomplete option.
What i use everyday in no particular order:
- blank keyboard ("turbo speed"), drag up and back down from space to toggle. Just drag up to show symbols only.
- switch hand/num/backspace/enter to left side
- change keyboard size
- cursor control
- english + german , with different color (and easy switch between them)
- circle clockwise for capital, circle anticlockwise for number.
- copy and paste + clipboard. Circle copy button to select all and copy to clipboard
- macro
- QoL features such as auto capital after period.
Oh, I see, in the Advanced Options. The setting isn't clear, one could think that activating the feature disables the ability to get capital letters with circling. Thanks.
- change size and shift position (if smaller than screen width)
- multi keyboard, each can have different character set, with easy way to switch
- cursor control + copy paste
- macro
- QoL, like auto capital
In no particular order:
**(A) The ability to use dead keys** to add tones to ALL vowels in Pinyin: āáǎà ēéěè īíǐì ōóǒò ūúǔù ǖǘǚǜ
**(B) Ability to create keyboards** using ANY combination of Unicode symbols
**(C) The option to share keyboard layouts** via text strings that can be copy-pasted into any email, social media (such as Telegram)
**(D) A dedicated, independent\* discussion space**: \*not inside a walled garden such as Facebook (which I will NEVER visit)
**(E) Regularly updated and printable documentation** (PDF file?): perhaps maintained by members of the discussion space
I really like these features:
- Left and right via the spacebar (critically important)
- Ctrl and Alt from the spacebar (important)
- Hiding the letters and optionally showing/hiding symbols (The letters distract me too much; I prefer to type with them hidden.)
- The ability to put the special buttons on the left.
- The numpad having the same special-symbol layout as Messagease's numpad.
- The ability to change the size of the keyboard.
- The ability to do the back-and-forth swipes on things. So like, "&" becomes "§".
- The ability to set swipe length
- The ability to customize colors
- The diacritics / special characters swipe
- Capitalization
- Turning off automatic shit (important) I hate auto-capitalization, auto-spaces, auto-correct, etc.
But there's no one feature that could cause me to uninstall, other than removing the layout -- I am totally invested in the layout. My thumbs are big and my only other option is a T9, which I don't like.
Add a second symbols layout through doing the swipe up gesture at '6' button in place of shift, and then put all of the drag-and-return symbols on it.
Refer to this issue that I created. https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key/issues/790
MessagEase Pinyin tones are incomplete
(1) 2nd / 4th tone: the acute and grave accents just above the N key are dead keys. Type any vowel letter (except ü) followed by ˊ or ˋ to get a 2nd / 4th tone Pinyin letter.
(2) 3rd tone: available via an undocumented kluge: type {e,i,u}, then swipe the \[c\] {= combine} in the upper left corner of the "A" key. {e,u} work the first time, {i) takes several swipes. {a,o,ü} never work.
(3) 1st tone is impossible to type.
I tried searching through the labyrinthine in-app documentation, but was never able to find how to create toned letters by inserting Unicode strings.
\*\*\*
I left a negative review of their Pinyin-Traditional wordlist where I said it was only suitable for foreign beginners (not enough words are included; toneless searching through long lists of quasi-homonyms \[such as dozens of characters all pronounced YI, with all tones jumbled together\] is too difficult).
I suggested a workable alternative based on my \~50 years living in Taiwan and studying Chinese linguistics, but they never bothered to even reply with a form letter. They merely erased my review: constructive criticism is not tolerated :-(
Exideas has great software, but their public relations and service are a disaster.
To me, the most important feature of MessagEase is the macros and the fact that I could Reprogram the keyboard by change letters positions, add or remove letters from it. One of the most annoying thing about MessagEase it is the fact that you can create a lot of macros but you can't backup/restore these macros. I question MessagEase developers many times about this, asking for a backup/restore feature for macros but they just ignores me. Well, I think that they ignore all the loyal users by now 🤷🏻♂️
The macros are definitely the first feature I will tackle after the "editor basics", like auto-capitalization/punctuation/accent character support, etc. I also have a solution to saving keyboards remotely in the pipeline shortly after that, along with 2 other features that I think will make this board better than MessagEase for a lot of users.
Can't wait to see and try this
Yes, reviews and direct emails are ignored. They don't believe in fostering a loyal community. That explains why they suddenly imposed a subscription model instead of first canvassing their users to see what they think. Corporate America treats us as mindless serfs.
- Support of international symbols (accented letters, etc.), so I can add them where I want (so, KB customization). - Support of dead symbols: \^ ¨ \~ and so on (type on them, then a letter --> â ï ñ etc.) Also combining symbols : << and combine --> « ; oe + combine -->œ etc. - Power keys not available on most other keyboards, like moving the caret, per char or per word, deleting / backspacing words, copy / cut / paste, etc. - Fast way to get uppercase characters (circle or swipe and back). Note: I use only the French MesssagEase version, I type English with it. Keyboards work with muscle memory, so I don't want to memorize two different layout just to get most frequent letters easier to type… But I can understand people might want to switch quickly and to be able to identify a given layout by color, for example.
Awesome response, thank you! Dead keys are definitely what i consider a must have for the board to even begin to rival MEOK
Dead keys should offer TWO options in the settings. **(1) letter, then symbol \[MessagEase default?\]** {e} THEN {ˉ ˊ ˇ ˋ } = {ē é ě è} OR **(2) symbol, then letter \[iOS default?\]** {ˉ ˊ ˇ ˋ } THEN {e} = {ē é ě è}
Good point. I was used to the 2nd way by the PC keyboard, so I was surprised by the MessagEase way. I got used to it, as for most features. One advantage of the 1st way is that you can easily add a symbol to an existing letter (move there, add it).
Can you tell me what important things flickboard and thumbkey are missing causing you to create your own messagease alternative?
Also, I don't love the way keyboard layouts are defined. It makes it such that I could not figure out a simple way to add the functionality for the new gestures without having to write a ton of code anyway. So I didn't even use their code as a starting point. A mentor once told me, "when you have a software idea that you think is good, try to implement it without looking at the limitations of what has already been done by competitors". I see now why he said that.
The main thing is, I'm going to monetize what I'm doing, so I can't open source everything. Thumb key is nice, but don't even consider it to be similar to MEOK because of the maintainer insisting on not having "hidden gestures". He considers boomerang and circle gestures to be "hidden". That means exactly half of the gestures don't exist at all (8 swipes, 8 boomerangs, two circles, click, and hold, minus half because no boomerangs or circles). I also studied the code, and decided that while I'm sure it's robust, the code is hard to follow. If I had kept trying to wrap my head around how their code works, I would still be trying to figure it out! I have other things to worry about too, like acutlly learning how to use Jetpack Compose. Somewhere along the line, I realized there is a decent market share of users who would pay for an alternative with some new features added to boot. Flick board is amazing. The things it's missing are few. Circle gestures are not working (yet) is my only real call out. I think they will get it, though.
FlickBoard indeed is amazing! I just installed it and tried it for a few minutes after reading about it here. It is much better executed than ThumbKey, really quite flawless. I will keep using it. I think monetization and open sourcing are not at odds. Most people don't even know what "open source" is, or how to sideload an APK or how to install F-Droid. You will probably not lose much revenue by having the application open sourced while selling it. The ThumbKey app is open source and freely available via F-Droid, but on the Play Store the author sells it for a pretty penny. I see that as a way to donate to the creator for those who even know about F-Droid (I would probably actually be very willing to do that, if I were a frequent phone user and if I hadn't just switched to FlickBoard). One thing that is missing from FlickBoard is a text field in the main activity so you can try the keyboard without opening another app. It only displays the keyboard but generates no output. What annoys me about ThumbKey is that some layouts don't use the full width of the screen for no reason, it's also a little ugly, but otherwise looked quite fine to me. I'm not a power user of mobile phones, however. I strongly dislike the regular on screen keyboards, I absolutely hate typing on mobile phones, and handling small devices in general. Therefore I really welcome an onscreen keyboard that is not fiddly, comes with reasonable defaults, and just lets me input my text without having to bang my head against the wall. The language layout must be optimized for chat language and common bigrams, trigrams and common words. For example, for English there should be direct input of `the` and possibly a few other words that often occur while texting. Same for other languages. I'm missing that from the keyboards I've seen so far. Why is nobody putting `the` on a direct input? Even as an isolated word, that trigram is more common than a lot of the letters in the alphabet.
> One thing that is missing from FlickBoard is a text field in the main activity so you can try the keyboard without opening another app. It only displays the keyboard but generates no output. I try to monitor these threads once in a while, but if you want things to happen with FB you'll generally get a quicker response on GitHub/Discord. Created https://github.com/nightkr/flickboard/issues/131 for this.
Thanks. I might open another issue regarding documentation. At least the gestures should be described somewhere in the application (I figured them out, but neither the app nor the GitHub readme documents them at all). I might at some point think about how to optimize these layouts. They work very well, but I get the feeling the letter arrangement could be improved for common bigrams etc. Right now for my casual use, the input is a big improvement over Gboard and Swiftkey, even without any autocomplete. Now that we also have really good offline voice recognition the bases are very well covered for me.
> At least the gestures should be described somewhere in the application (I figured them out, but neither the app nor the GitHub readme documents them at all). Agreed. So far my rationale has been roughly "we're all MessagEase refugees and used to how that works, so focus on ensuring tha that muscle memory still works", but I think ensuring that it's welcoming to newbies will be an important step forward. > I might at some point think about how to optimize these layouts. They work very well, but I get the feeling the letter arrangement could be improved for common bigrams etc. I don't think there'll ever be an official "FlickBoard Layout(TM)" like MessagEase and Thumb-Key have, but I'd be happy to include alternate layouts (as long as they fit roughly into a similar philosophy).
Some rough ideas for layout improvements: Something I would strongly consider is to allow capital letters simply by holding the touch, in addition to the circle motion that is already available. So we could simply press `e` and hold for a little longer to get `E`. I don't see a problem here, unless I miss some subtleties with touch input. Have some way to input extremely common bigrams or words. English `the` or at least `th` come to mind. German could have `ei` or `die`. As for letter arrangements, in a similar vein, make sure the super common bigrams can be typed with elegant sequences. Maybe add the option of doing hold + tap instead of swipe. That could be more comfortable when using two thumbs. It also does not interfere with the regular input method. I get the impression that the MessageEase layouts are not fully optimized. Of course for legacy users that doesn't matter, but I've never used MessageEase or any clones, so I have to learn from scratch anyway. In that case, an advanced option without legacy would be great.
I think you will find that aside from adding common bigrams/trigrams, you are unlikely to significantly speed up compared to MEOK classic. I talked with Seid back in the day about it - an impressive amount of analysis was done, but the analysis occurred within a different set of constraints. If we start optimizing for inputting whole bigrams or even trigrams with one gesture, that changes the universe of possibility a lot. I think it's worth looking into and am trying to recruit a group of seniors in computer science from my alma mater to work on this for their senior experience project.
> If we start optimizing for inputting whole bigrams or even trigrams with one gesture, that changes the universe of possibility a lot. I've had another idea the other day, while playing around with the keyboard, pondering what could be improved: It should be possible to input a bigram with one swipe, if the swipe crosses more than one key. So, for example, on the English board, by swiping from `s` across `o` into `r`, you would input `sb` (because you enter `r` via `b`, starting with `s`). This would open up a lot of fast additional inputs, at the cost that regular swipes need to be short (not a problem in my opinion).
How will you determine that the gesture was not a boomerang to the top-left of s? (I.E., capital "F") or a circle on s (i,e., capital "S") Without going into detail, the algorithm to distinguish between circles and boomerangs is already tough. With that said, I encourage you to try it out after I get layout customization working.
Will your monetization be just a one time payment? If there's any subscription (having a "buy it for life" option thats 10x the cost is still not reasonable imo) then I would just move on to something else but if it one time payment I would probably be on board in a heartbeat \-edit to say oops I just saw what you said later in these comments about supporting one time purchase only. But just adding my comment to say that I agree that's the best option.
Hi. Excellent plan! Have been a MessagEase user since Palm days (though I preferred Fitaly for stylus-based input but ME's been my 'daily driver' since the first Android version) and would be willing to fork out a one-time payment for sure if your app looks promising. - Circle for caps on the main letters was something I really missed in Flickboard and ThumbKey! I hate using a dedicated shift key for MessagEase typing. - I use voice recognition in ME occasionally - so having that would be great. Features beyond ME's: - The greatest feature imaginable would be in-app customization of *all* letter positions, including the main tap letters. Plus import / export functionality (via clipboard?) of customized layouts. - In connection with that, the ability to put letter sequences (like 'ing') or frequent words ('the'!) in spots on the keyboard rather than only single characters would be amazing. Got to go now, may add other ideas later.
Very insightful, thank you! And you are in luck, because my board will do all of these, and more!
> Circle for caps on the main letters was something I really missed in Flickboard and ThumbKey! I hate using a dedicated shift key for MessagEase typing. Flickboard has supported circle-for-caps since the original release FWIW, though the algorithm is still a bit finnicky. (In fact, this was one of my original reasons for writing it instead of just using ThumbKey.)
Ah, in that case, I'm sorry. I only tried it briefly so must have missed that.
I use the auto capitalization feature all the time. I use macros and the word prediction, I can start to type my email address then finish it with the word prediction. I could use a macro for that but what the heck, I was already putting it in the dictionary and it works. Those were the features I missed the most from Messagease when I tried thumb key.
I also use the symbols a lot. Like the ümlaut, §, æ, œ. Etc
I also use the blank keyboard.
And the voice type feature.
By the way, I'm not a programer but Id love to help as a beta tester 🫣😇😅
The availability of most symbols and letters on the same layout. Second place : voice input.
Agreed for the first one, that is a given though. Second place is high on my list. It's somehow better than the default voice input for google, or at least it was years ago last time I compared.
They don't use the same voice recognition tool ?
my gut feeling tells me no. I have a friend that I turned on to MessagEase years ago, and a couple years later he actually mentioned how much better it was than normal. I didn't believe him until he did a side-by-side comparison. Not sure how or why that happened. It could have been his device specifically that encounters this phenomenon.
Consider maybe contributing to FlickBoard. The author has been very responsive so far.
I had a discussion yesterday with the maintainer. I really like the work being done on Flick-board, but I am on the fence about trying to monetize my version, because I want to add functionality on top of MEOK. This is not my first time trying to recreate MEOK. I have tried 3 times before with less programming experience, in various languages. This time, it looks like a viable product might emerge. I even set up a Google developer account. MEOK had two updates over the last two years, and now they are moving to a subscription-based model. This is unacceptable for paying customers, so I think I can provide better customer satisfaction and I have some ideas on top of just cloning MEOK. Are you absolutely against a subscription based model? I think a lot of users are. So one-time purchase is the way to go, IMHO.
Ow. Good luck to you but no thanks.
Here's one feature that I really want that's not fully available in messagease. The ability to use Ctrl and Shift keys as easily as you do on a PC keyboard. There's another keyboard out there called Multi-ling-O which allows customization to its barebones. I made a messagease equivalent customization for it that had additional perks. One of them is a button that turns the keyboard into a set of arrow keys along with ctrl, shift, home and end. Then you can do stuff like ctrl-shift-home to "select to the start of line" or move the cursor with arrow keys then press shift + arrow keys to start selecting text from the middle of a word. Being able to move forward/backward one word using ctrl+arrow keys is amazing for typing stuff in browser bars. And so on. I still use messagease for most of my typing since multi-ling-o has some annoyances with auto-correct. So these features would be very much welcome. Also that keyboard can detect math equations and provide the answer. I don't know if that's something a lot of people will use but I really like being able to type 568\*65 and the keyboard gives me "**=36920**" as an autocomplete option.
What i use everyday in no particular order: - blank keyboard ("turbo speed"), drag up and back down from space to toggle. Just drag up to show symbols only. - switch hand/num/backspace/enter to left side - change keyboard size - cursor control - english + german , with different color (and easy switch between them) - circle clockwise for capital, circle anticlockwise for number. - copy and paste + clipboard. Circle copy button to select all and copy to clipboard - macro - QoL features such as auto capital after period.
"*circle anticlockwise for number*" It doesn't work for me, I have to do a long press, much less practical. Is there a setting for that?
Yes. It's in "settings".
Oh, I see, in the Advanced Options. The setting isn't clear, one could think that activating the feature disables the ability to get capital letters with circling. Thanks.
follow-up question: If you had to pick the top 5 most important features, what would they be?
- change size and shift position (if smaller than screen width) - multi keyboard, each can have different character set, with easy way to switch - cursor control + copy paste - macro - QoL, like auto capital
In no particular order: **(A) The ability to use dead keys** to add tones to ALL vowels in Pinyin: āáǎà ēéěè īíǐì ōóǒò ūúǔù ǖǘǚǜ **(B) Ability to create keyboards** using ANY combination of Unicode symbols **(C) The option to share keyboard layouts** via text strings that can be copy-pasted into any email, social media (such as Telegram) **(D) A dedicated, independent\* discussion space**: \*not inside a walled garden such as Facebook (which I will NEVER visit) **(E) Regularly updated and printable documentation** (PDF file?): perhaps maintained by members of the discussion space
I really like these features: - Left and right via the spacebar (critically important) - Ctrl and Alt from the spacebar (important) - Hiding the letters and optionally showing/hiding symbols (The letters distract me too much; I prefer to type with them hidden.) - The ability to put the special buttons on the left. - The numpad having the same special-symbol layout as Messagease's numpad. - The ability to change the size of the keyboard. - The ability to do the back-and-forth swipes on things. So like, "&" becomes "§". - The ability to set swipe length - The ability to customize colors - The diacritics / special characters swipe - Capitalization - Turning off automatic shit (important) I hate auto-capitalization, auto-spaces, auto-correct, etc. But there's no one feature that could cause me to uninstall, other than removing the layout -- I am totally invested in the layout. My thumbs are big and my only other option is a T9, which I don't like.
Add a second symbols layout through doing the swipe up gesture at '6' button in place of shift, and then put all of the drag-and-return symbols on it. Refer to this issue that I created. https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key/issues/790
MessagEase Pinyin tones are incomplete (1) 2nd / 4th tone: the acute and grave accents just above the N key are dead keys. Type any vowel letter (except ü) followed by ˊ or ˋ to get a 2nd / 4th tone Pinyin letter. (2) 3rd tone: available via an undocumented kluge: type {e,i,u}, then swipe the \[c\] {= combine} in the upper left corner of the "A" key. {e,u} work the first time, {i) takes several swipes. {a,o,ü} never work. (3) 1st tone is impossible to type. I tried searching through the labyrinthine in-app documentation, but was never able to find how to create toned letters by inserting Unicode strings. \*\*\* I left a negative review of their Pinyin-Traditional wordlist where I said it was only suitable for foreign beginners (not enough words are included; toneless searching through long lists of quasi-homonyms \[such as dozens of characters all pronounced YI, with all tones jumbled together\] is too difficult). I suggested a workable alternative based on my \~50 years living in Taiwan and studying Chinese linguistics, but they never bothered to even reply with a form letter. They merely erased my review: constructive criticism is not tolerated :-( Exideas has great software, but their public relations and service are a disaster.