4 ms·

Sounds like Swype's mistake was either not getting a proper patent, or not enforcing it. To be honest, though, I never did like using gesture based swipe typin

Sounds like Swype's mistake was either not getting a proper patent, or not enforcing it. To be honest, though, I never did like using gesture based swipe typing. It always felt like a sloppy and imprecise input method to me.

slig 9y ago
Have you ever tried Gboard? It's way better than the first gen of swipe typing.
- danjc 9y ago
  Curious to know whether you've allowed full access to it?
- rspeer 9y ago
  The only advantage to Gboard I've seen is that it's built in. I used to use SwiftKey but eventually switched to Gboard just so I didn't have to keep SwiftKey set up. I encounter one frustrating problem with Gboard that I never encountered on other keyboards, and I don't know if it's a bug or if I'm "using it wrong". Sometimes I will swipe-gesture a word and the keyboard simply won't recognize it as a gesture. I could be moving my finger all over the place for 5 seconds and it'll just type the last letter I land on. I backspace and do the same thing again and it works. Am I accidentally making some sort of "out of bounds" gesture without realizing it? Is my phone too slow to start noticing that I'm swiping? Or is this just a random bug?
  - slig 9y ago
    Sometimes on my iPhone 6 it was laggy, but most of the time I had no issues. Now on a Z2 Play it's very snappy. So maybe it's your phone.
  - bklaasen 9y ago
    It's a bug. You just see a single straight line from the first letter to wherever your finger is and the keyboard fails to guess the word.
ChrisSD 9y ago
According to the comments on that article they do have a proper patent and do collect licensing fees from other businesses. Which may be partly why they see their consumer app as being redundant.
MrMember 9y ago
I occasionally give gesture typing a try since it's built into a lot of keyboards now and I've also found it to be imprecise. On a normal software keyboard I can type as fast as I want and count on autocorrect to fix most of my mistakes. When swiping I find myself stopping after every word to make sure it got the right one (it often doesn't) resulting in a halting style of typing that ends up being slower than regular typing.
- Crespyl 9y ago
  I find auto-complete/suggestions to be mildly annoying at best, and auto-correct (anything that retroactively changes what I've entered) to be physically unpleasant to use. That said, gestural input does feel significantly more natural compared to trying to cram a QWERTY layout onto a pocketable screen. For me the ideal midground has proven to be a "dumb" keyboard that has a layout designed for touchscreens from the outset; "MessageEase" (which I plug at every opportunity) uses a combination of single taps and directional swipes with a layout based on letter frequency. It takes a bit of adjusting to, but it provides a great balance between precision and speed, while also having plenty of room for less common symbols and Ctrl/Alt/modifier keys that are useful for SSH, all without having to tap through extra layers or menus.
takeda 9y ago
You are assuming that no one pays royalties, and I don't blame you because that's also implied in the article, but I have hard time to believe that companies like Google or Samsung would do that. I think when Nuance purchased Swype all they wanted is the patent, and simply didn't want to spend resources on developing Swype when they could get money through royalties. The original Swype preferred to be sold to OEMs, but OEMs typically want to make their Android version unique, so might actually prefer to implement their own keyboard with that functionality. This plus the fact that Swype quality degraded since Nuance's purchase makes me believe that they just went the route of permitting other companies for using their patent in exchange for royalties.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  In HN parlance, once they shut down their own app do they become a... patent troll?
  - serf 9y ago
    most patent troll firms just buy portfolios worth of patents without the extra baggage of the company that created the patent. trolling comes down to their use of patent ownership and how they (ab)use it to make cash.
  - takeda 9y ago
    I don't know, in my view a patent troll is a company that managed to obtain a patent for something trivial that most people would not even think of obtain a patent for. For example: - displaying originating city/state based on area code of a calling number - swipe to unlock the phone - rounded corners and is trying to get money from anyone who uses it Typing through swiping is a bit more innovative. To be honest, I think there shouldn't be any patents on software. That field is thrives on building on top of work of others, and things change quickly, so patents are actually stifling innovation. At least if software patents can't be eliminated they should be much much shorter.
wnissen 9y ago
For producing "normal" English with longer words it was invaluable. It also handled multiple languages with ease compared to the default iOS keyboard. But I could tell the last few years that they weren't really maintaining it. I'll probably use it until it stops working and then switch to the current state of the art.
- andybak 9y ago
  The best demo I ever gave of swiping was when I typed "onomatopoeia" in under a second despite the fact I couldn't remember how to spell it.
zodPod 9y ago
I think the biggest problem Swype had (once it published) was probably ignoring its user base. I was one of the early adopters when it showed up on the play market and I loved it. It was one of the bigger available apps at the time so I gravitated toward it. However, they messaged a bunch of things up and didn't give us ways to turn off their "new features" and a keyboard is not something you want to change often. So, since there were copycats, I moved to one of those that gave me the freedoms that I wanted and didn't have the annoying features that I didn't. I remember the forums at the time having a HUGE amount of people claiming to be doing the same thing. I use GBoard now and it has this horrible "correct the previous word" feature that I can't turn off. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Google is big enough to keep it around forever without really listening to us. But this feature is awful. For an example, I'll type something like "a little bit of mambo" and, for some reason, it'll decide to replace "of" with "if" or something along those lines. It's not a consistent thing with any combination but I really don't want to have to erase two words to correct something that I had already dubbed correct before moving on.
- oakwhiz 9y ago
  That's odd, Gboard doesn't do that for me.
- novia 9y ago
  "I use GBoard now and it has this horrible "correct the previous word" feature that I can't turn off." I've been having this exact problem with both swype and SwiftKey. anyone know a gesture keyboard without this crap?

slig 9y ago

Have you ever tried Gboard? It's way better than the first gen of swipe typing.

danjc 9y ago
Curious to know whether you've allowed full access to it?
rspeer 9y ago
The only advantage to Gboard I've seen is that it's built in. I used to use SwiftKey but eventually switched to Gboard just so I didn't have to keep SwiftKey set up. I encounter one frustrating problem with Gboard that I never encountered on other keyboards, and I don't know if it's a bug or if I'm "using it wrong". Sometimes I will swipe-gesture a word and the keyboard simply won't recognize it as a gesture. I could be moving my finger all over the place for 5 seconds and it'll just type the last letter I land on. I backspace and do the same thing again and it works. Am I accidentally making some sort of "out of bounds" gesture without realizing it? Is my phone too slow to start noticing that I'm swiping? Or is this just a random bug?
- slig 9y ago
  Sometimes on my iPhone 6 it was laggy, but most of the time I had no issues. Now on a Z2 Play it's very snappy. So maybe it's your phone.
- bklaasen 9y ago
  It's a bug. You just see a single straight line from the first letter to wherever your finger is and the keyboard fails to guess the word.

ChrisSD 9y ago

According to the comments on that article they do have a proper patent and do collect licensing fees from other businesses. Which may be partly why they see their consumer app as being redundant.

MrMember 9y ago

I occasionally give gesture typing a try since it's built into a lot of keyboards now and I've also found it to be imprecise. On a normal software keyboard I can type as fast as I want and count on autocorrect to fix most of my mistakes. When swiping I find myself stopping after every word to make sure it got the right one (it often doesn't) resulting in a halting style of typing that ends up being slower than regular typing.

Crespyl 9y ago
I find auto-complete/suggestions to be mildly annoying at best, and auto-correct (anything that retroactively changes what I've entered) to be physically unpleasant to use. That said, gestural input does feel significantly more natural compared to trying to cram a QWERTY layout onto a pocketable screen. For me the ideal midground has proven to be a "dumb" keyboard that has a layout designed for touchscreens from the outset; "MessageEase" (which I plug at every opportunity) uses a combination of single taps and directional swipes with a layout based on letter frequency. It takes a bit of adjusting to, but it provides a great balance between precision and speed, while also having plenty of room for less common symbols and Ctrl/Alt/modifier keys that are useful for SSH, all without having to tap through extra layers or menus.

takeda 9y ago

You are assuming that no one pays royalties, and I don't blame you because that's also implied in the article, but I have hard time to believe that companies like Google or Samsung would do that. I think when Nuance purchased Swype all they wanted is the patent, and simply didn't want to spend resources on developing Swype when they could get money through royalties. The original Swype preferred to be sold to OEMs, but OEMs typically want to make their Android version unique, so might actually prefer to implement their own keyboard with that functionality. This plus the fact that Swype quality degraded since Nuance's purchase makes me believe that they just went the route of permitting other companies for using their patent in exchange for royalties.

ggg9990 9y ago
In HN parlance, once they shut down their own app do they become a... patent troll?
- serf 9y ago
  most patent troll firms just buy portfolios worth of patents without the extra baggage of the company that created the patent. trolling comes down to their use of patent ownership and how they (ab)use it to make cash.
- takeda 9y ago
  I don't know, in my view a patent troll is a company that managed to obtain a patent for something trivial that most people would not even think of obtain a patent for. For example: - displaying originating city/state based on area code of a calling number - swipe to unlock the phone - rounded corners and is trying to get money from anyone who uses it Typing through swiping is a bit more innovative. To be honest, I think there shouldn't be any patents on software. That field is thrives on building on top of work of others, and things change quickly, so patents are actually stifling innovation. At least if software patents can't be eliminated they should be much much shorter.

wnissen 9y ago

For producing "normal" English with longer words it was invaluable. It also handled multiple languages with ease compared to the default iOS keyboard. But I could tell the last few years that they weren't really maintaining it. I'll probably use it until it stops working and then switch to the current state of the art.

andybak 9y ago
The best demo I ever gave of swiping was when I typed "onomatopoeia" in under a second despite the fact I couldn't remember how to spell it.

zodPod 9y ago

I think the biggest problem Swype had (once it published) was probably ignoring its user base. I was one of the early adopters when it showed up on the play market and I loved it. It was one of the bigger available apps at the time so I gravitated toward it. However, they messaged a bunch of things up and didn't give us ways to turn off their "new features" and a keyboard is not something you want to change often. So, since there were copycats, I moved to one of those that gave me the freedoms that I wanted and didn't have the annoying features that I didn't. I remember the forums at the time having a HUGE amount of people claiming to be doing the same thing. I use GBoard now and it has this horrible "correct the previous word" feature that I can't turn off. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Google is big enough to keep it around forever without really listening to us. But this feature is awful. For an example, I'll type something like "a little bit of mambo" and, for some reason, it'll decide to replace "of" with "if" or something along those lines. It's not a consistent thing with any combination but I really don't want to have to erase two words to correct something that I had already dubbed correct before moving on.

oakwhiz 9y ago
That's odd, Gboard doesn't do that for me.
novia 9y ago
"I use GBoard now and it has this horrible "correct the previous word" feature that I can't turn off." I've been having this exact problem with both swype and SwiftKey. anyone know a gesture keyboard without this crap?