5 ms·

5 Tiles Keyboard

35 points by intull 12y ago

RBerenguel 12y ago
Pretty similar to other endeavours previously discussed here (like ASETNIOP)
leanthonyrn 12y ago
"Our brains were structured for 5 digits." I would think, if that was the case, we would first optimize our alphabet for 25/20/15/10/5 characters. Then this would be ideal.
- p4bl0 12y ago
  Yea, actually I believe this is not true at all. I learned in an intro to cognitive psychology class that it seems that our brain is wired to recognize sets of 1, 2, and 3 things directly, but that after that we construct the numbers. For instance when we see 5 things it is actually 3+2 that we see. The experiment was based on response time + accurateness when showing people sets of geometrical shapes for very short periods of time, sometimes using the same shape for all elements, sometimes random shapes, and sometimes groups of similar shapes. I don't recall the precise reference though, maybe someone else knows it? To get back to the keyboard, I would like to see a demo video of someone actually typing something with it. The current video doesn't give any sense of what it is like to use this keyboard, and doesn't make me want to try it at all.
  - wingerlang 12y ago
    There really is a lack of actual usage-videos which is kind of off putting. The posted "trailer" video didn't make me want to use it either, although this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOPalCIbGA8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOPalCIbGA8 made me a little bit more curious. And regarding the 3+2 thing that seems true, I always count to 5 in couples of 3s and 2s.
    - Timsalabim 12y ago
      He's really slow in the video. I use Swift key (not swiping, just typing) and I'm many times faster than that. Can't see how an expert would be faster either, the gestures simply take longer than simply hitting the right spot. Also Swiftkey is pretty forgiving once you use it more and the predictions become a real time saver.
    - p4bl0 12y ago
      I'm sorry I may be stupid but I still don't understand how the keyboard works after having seen that second video. Seriously they should make a video where we can see what happens on the keyboard and on the screen at the same time. Why every time the finger starts to slides the only letters left on the keyboard are "EABCD"? How do I type an 'n' for instance? I see that they do a round-trip to enter numbers, but how am I supposed to enter '6'? These may be the worst demo videos I've ever seen. I remember another alternative-paradigm keyboard, 8pen, which had pretty good and instructive videos. They should learn from that.
      - adyda 12y ago
        Each of the 5 tiles represent a group of letters/numbers. The reason you see 'EABCD' is because he is only using the first (blue) tile. If you wanted to type 'n' you would put your finger on the yellow, which contains 'KLONM', and slide it to the fourth tile. The numbers I'm not sure. I think it is the same concept with 1-4 on the first tile (blue) and other numbers on other tiles. Still doesn't seem like it would be faster for typing. Blue (1st) tile is EABCD, Green (2nd) is FIGHJ, Yellow (3rd) is KLONM, Orange (4th) is PQRTS, and Red (5th) is VWXY.
        p4bl0 12y ago
        > he is only using the first (blue) tile That's what I assumed too, but I didn't want to be sure of it because one have to be too stupid to do a demo of a product using always the same part. "Look I designed a keyboard and I can type with it: 'aaaaaaaaaaa'". Okay, so it means that if I want to type 'n' I hit the 3rd tile and then I have to move four tiles away. Except I can't. So I guess I'll have to go backward when I reach the last tile in the direction I chose. But that seem to conflict with what I inferred for numbers…
gbog 12y ago
If the people doing this are listening: I don't think the business model is ok. If this keyboard is to get some traction, it will require us users to use it for real before paying. You can't have a keyboard lite, it's a vital utility, not a game. If I type a url or a password and discover that a character is only on premium, I'll switch back to my usual keyboard and not look back. Another remark: typing number is very important and must be safe and fast, I didn't see a number mode. It should be easily done on five tiles.
- matthewrudy 12y ago
  Swiftkey's approach is to give you 30 days free. Of course you can get around this, but with Swiftkey the more you use it, the more it learns. I imagine they have reasonable conversion rates.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mobilemaggie 12y ago
  We're listening, and really appreciate all of the great feedback here - we're taking it all on board. Good point about a number mode - at the moment, the best way to see the Number gestures is in the Cheat Sheet: http://fivetiles.com/use-cheatsheets/ http://fivetiles.com/use-cheatsheets/
keerthiko 12y ago
The way they provide responses to their user reviews on the Play store is a bit off-putting -- they have a very "you're doing it wrong" tone, rather than accepting the premises and complaints of their users. I think the basic concept is intriguing, but the lack of intuitive execution is a huge show-stopper when competing with things like swype.
techaddict009 12y ago
Is is it inspired from Google's Gmail Tap April Fool Prank? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KhZKNZO8mQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KhZKNZO8mQ
- 1ris 12y ago
  There is such a keyboard, i used it, and i case you take the huddle of learning morse code (that is very hard and requires LOTs of pratice that i unfortunatly don't have) it's absolutly awesome. Eyes free typing. I think that shouldn't be a aprils fool.
Hasu 12y ago
I can't figure out how I'm expected to use more than one digit on this thing at once. I usually type on a touchscreen keyboard with at least two fingers(either both thumbs, or the index and middle finger of one hand). The sliding action makes using two different hands impossible- I can't type many characters without having to move my thumbs out of each others' way. That won't work. This leads me to think that I should use one hand, maybe even four fingers. But then my entire hand moves position every time I have to slide, which means I have to move my entire hand back to the start position to use a different finger for the next character. The only way I can type with this system is using a single finger, and that's just way too slow.
tsm 12y ago
On the subject of alternative keyboards, I've been using MessagEase (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.mekb https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.me...) for about a year and am pretty pleased with it. It's still roughly the size of a regular QWERTY keyboard, but the buttons are enormous, and I can type any letter, number, or symbol I care about without modifier keys. (It accomplishes this by differentiating between taps and short swipes—so each button has nine characters assigned to it, the tapping one and then eight for swiping to each side/corner.)
- Wilduck 12y ago
  I've been using MessageEase too and I really like it. I was fed up with miss-keying on a standard Qwerty shaped on-screen keyboard, and I really haven't liked any predictive typing solutions I've tried. What I like about MessageEase is that the keys are big enough that I don't ever miss what I'm typing, which eliminates the part of typing that slowed me down the most--going back and fixing typing errors. I can whip out a 160 character text message in about 30-40 seconds with correct capitalization and punctuation, which is about all I can ask for in a phone keyboard.
cool-RR 12y ago
Public service announcement to all companies that are trying to sell us keyboards or keyboard-like solutions: I fully expect, when I go into your site, to see a video of someone using your keyboard to type FAST. (Which is probably the most important criteria in a keyboard.) This is essential because if your own people who developed the keyboard can only get to X wpm, odds are low that your average users are going to exceed X wpm. If I don't see a video of someone using your keyboard to type fast, I'm going to assume that you were not able to produce such a video, because your keyboard doesn't really allow for someone to type fast, which means that your keyboard is pretty much useless. Thank you.
- intull 12y ago
  They do have a video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUjBdMz1q8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUjBdMz1q8I
  - sexmonad 12y ago
    That video is just auto-complete after the first letter...
    - intull 12y ago
      Smart! Didn't observe that.
    - mobilemaggie 12y ago
      Yes, it's a practice application with pangrams, with the auto-complete turned on. Here's a video of a speed test with everything turned off: http://youtu.be/xigziUyUcrM http://youtu.be/xigziUyUcrM (good point to get this more visible on the website)
  - cool-RR 12y ago
    After viewing this video six times, I'd like someone to explain to me how the program knew to autocomplete "z" into "zippers" without consulting the users. Could it be that they've trained it for this specific sentence, making this entire video meaningless at best and a fraud at worst?
Splendor 12y ago
Neither the video or images were compelling enough to get me to install a free app. Show me someone using the keyboard.
diggan 12y ago
Hm, feels like this should make it more complicated to enter text. Let's say I have a telephone and it has 11 buttons. 0 - 9, call and hang up. This is easy for a person to remember and use. But, if we have a telephone with 4 buttons, 0 - 5 is one button, 6 - 9 is another, call and hang up is two others, the telephone becomes MORE complex and hard to use. One button, one functionality feels like the easiest and fastest way to type, mentally.
- swombat 12y ago
  That's 12 buttons :-)
- evanb 12y ago
  How quickly we all forget. It was not that long ago that telephones only had 0-9, *, #, call, and hang up. People texted like crazy anyway. Push the button multiple times to cycle through the letters, or enable T9 and let the phone autocomplete the word.
k-mcgrady 12y ago
Just downloaded it to try. WAY too high of a learning curve. For example to delete a character you swipe up on the first tile (likely accidentally activating Google Now). To show/hide the cheat sheet swipe down on the fourth tile. I can tell right from the start this is way too much information to remember. Swiping keyboards already work pretty well and are quite easy to pickup.
nzonbi 12y ago
This is an interesting design, independently if it may or may not be successful. In my opinion the keyboard should be reinvented. The qwerty and similar designs works, but not for everybody. I for example, took a course on using qwerty correctly, with all fingers, and without having to look at it, and failed. I can type fairly fast, but must look at the keys most of the time, and mostly use both index fingers only. The arrangement feels not intuitive for me, more like a mess. I can't never remember where a key is located exactly. All I can memorize are approximate locations. I am sure that at least for me, there could be better keyboard implementations. I have been thinking, and have some ideas. Both for on-screen touch, and physical keyboards. I may try implementing them soon. There is currently a cool trend on the PC market, in which companies are trying innovative form factors. The hybrid laptop-tablets are becoming popular. There are great devices on the market. MS surface 3, lenovo yoga and miix, asus convertibles, acer R7 and switch, are good examples. But the way I see it, these devices are saddened by the ugly and not cool qwerty keyboards. I wonder why those companies that have the resources, and are eager to differentiate on the market, haven't tried any alternative to the old qwerty. The world needs more creativity. For example, what does stop Microsoft, from offering a choice of alternative keyboard implementations as surface covers? In my opinion this is a big missed opportunity, and I hope these companies realize it someday. In the meantime, I may soon come up with a homemade alternative keyboard for my personal use. For those that the qwerty keyboard works, they should continue using it. But for those that don't, which I suspect are the majority, could use alternatives. There is an interesting opportunity in the market for those that realize it.
- skywhopper 12y ago
  I'm guessing it's harder to learn to touch type these days for folks who spend huge amounts of time using keyboards. While you're taking the course, you're partially hobbled by only knowing a few letters by memory, and you spend 90% of your day needing to actually type, so practicing your new touch-typing has got to be very hard to do. I learned to type with two fingers on computers in the 80s and could type pretty fast, but in high school (90s) I took a semester-long typing class, and while it was harder at first, touch-typing soon enough became so much faster it was well worth the effort to overcome my old habits. You're right that the QWERTY is screwy. It was designed to be. But while I agree alternative keyboards are something that should be researched, I also think learning to touch-type qwerty will be such a benefit to anyone who types much at all that it'll be worth the pain to do so, even though yes, it's probably way harder today than it was in the early 90s.
Siecje 12y ago
Doug Engelbart was right about the future.
gweinberg 12y ago
It seems to me that four would be a much better number than five, since our thumbs do not line up with our fingers.
smoyer 12y ago
I sometimes do serious work from my Android phone and the keyboard is extremely important ... I haven't found anything that approaches the convenience of this keyboard: http://www.meritline.com/logitech-tablet-keyboard-android-920-003390---p-75240.aspx?source=fghdac&gclid=CjkKEQjwqYacBRDO-Mrk6_vr8eQBEiQAWJadfI_zvT9tG0-kM5AUFaTKLU1Q6FVpBBml6r83endabIHw_wcB http://www.meritline.com/logitech-tablet-keyboard-android-92...
Roboprog 12y ago
So it's like having 10 or 12 buttons to write a text, only worse???
1ris 12y ago
Absolutly awesome. I tried serveral alternative keyboards since the day i own a smartphone, this is the first one I liked right from the start. Minuum seemed pretty lame, haven't tried it, but I tried Swype, Swiftkey, GKOS, 8Pen, and a morse-key keyboard. The latter was very neat in theory, but the learning curve was just to steep. Now, starting form thre and increasing the number of buttons from two to five and adding hints on for the fly is IMO genius. Two thumbs up. Now i want a smartwatch. I just wished there was a explanation what the difference between the light and the full version is. /edit: And I think i have a bug: The Enter key does not work, or is that a limitation of the free edition? Could be, I will buy the full version tomorrow. /edit2: No, it's just that i confused "enter" and "go".
- moollaza 12y ago
  I really think you should give Minuum a try. I've used most of the ones you listed above (Swype, Swiftkey, 8Pen, Fleksy) and ended up sticking with Minuum. I've been using it for almost a year and don't regret switching. I used to love Swype, but it started to get pretty slow and once I switched to Minuum, it was nice to see how much screen space I could reclaim.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- brenfrow 12y ago
  I did the exact same thing, I had no idea there even was a "go" button, thanks for sharing this.

35 points by intull 12y ago

Pretty similar to other endeavours previously discussed here (like ASETNIOP)

"Our brains were structured for 5 digits." I would think, if that was the case, we would first optimize our alphabet for 25/20/15/10/5 characters. Then this would be ideal.

p4bl0 12y ago
Yea, actually I believe this is not true at all. I learned in an intro to cognitive psychology class that it seems that our brain is wired to recognize sets of 1, 2, and 3 things directly, but that after that we construct the numbers. For instance when we see 5 things it is actually 3+2 that we see. The experiment was based on response time + accurateness when showing people sets of geometrical shapes for very short periods of time, sometimes using the same shape for all elements, sometimes random shapes, and sometimes groups of similar shapes. I don't recall the precise reference though, maybe someone else knows it? To get back to the keyboard, I would like to see a demo video of someone actually typing something with it. The current video doesn't give any sense of what it is like to use this keyboard, and doesn't make me want to try it at all.
- wingerlang 12y ago
  There really is a lack of actual usage-videos which is kind of off putting. The posted "trailer" video didn't make me want to use it either, although this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOPalCIbGA8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOPalCIbGA8 made me a little bit more curious. And regarding the 3+2 thing that seems true, I always count to 5 in couples of 3s and 2s.
  - Timsalabim 12y ago
    He's really slow in the video. I use Swift key (not swiping, just typing) and I'm many times faster than that. Can't see how an expert would be faster either, the gestures simply take longer than simply hitting the right spot. Also Swiftkey is pretty forgiving once you use it more and the predictions become a real time saver.
  - p4bl0 12y ago
    I'm sorry I may be stupid but I still don't understand how the keyboard works after having seen that second video. Seriously they should make a video where we can see what happens on the keyboard and on the screen at the same time. Why every time the finger starts to slides the only letters left on the keyboard are "EABCD"? How do I type an 'n' for instance? I see that they do a round-trip to enter numbers, but how am I supposed to enter '6'? These may be the worst demo videos I've ever seen. I remember another alternative-paradigm keyboard, 8pen, which had pretty good and instructive videos. They should learn from that.
    - adyda 12y ago
      Each of the 5 tiles represent a group of letters/numbers. The reason you see 'EABCD' is because he is only using the first (blue) tile. If you wanted to type 'n' you would put your finger on the yellow, which contains 'KLONM', and slide it to the fourth tile. The numbers I'm not sure. I think it is the same concept with 1-4 on the first tile (blue) and other numbers on other tiles. Still doesn't seem like it would be faster for typing. Blue (1st) tile is EABCD, Green (2nd) is FIGHJ, Yellow (3rd) is KLONM, Orange (4th) is PQRTS, and Red (5th) is VWXY.
      - p4bl0 12y ago
        > he is only using the first (blue) tile That's what I assumed too, but I didn't want to be sure of it because one have to be too stupid to do a demo of a product using always the same part. "Look I designed a keyboard and I can type with it: 'aaaaaaaaaaa'". Okay, so it means that if I want to type 'n' I hit the 3rd tile and then I have to move four tiles away. Except I can't. So I guess I'll have to go backward when I reach the last tile in the direction I chose. But that seem to conflict with what I inferred for numbers…

gbog 12y ago

If the people doing this are listening: I don't think the business model is ok. If this keyboard is to get some traction, it will require us users to use it for real before paying. You can't have a keyboard lite, it's a vital utility, not a game. If I type a url or a password and discover that a character is only on premium, I'll switch back to my usual keyboard and not look back. Another remark: typing number is very important and must be safe and fast, I didn't see a number mode. It should be easily done on five tiles.

matthewrudy 12y ago
Swiftkey's approach is to give you 30 days free. Of course you can get around this, but with Swiftkey the more you use it, the more it learns. I imagine they have reasonable conversion rates.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mobilemaggie 12y ago
We're listening, and really appreciate all of the great feedback here - we're taking it all on board. Good point about a number mode - at the moment, the best way to see the Number gestures is in the Cheat Sheet: http://fivetiles.com/use-cheatsheets/ http://fivetiles.com/use-cheatsheets/

keerthiko 12y ago

The way they provide responses to their user reviews on the Play store is a bit off-putting -- they have a very "you're doing it wrong" tone, rather than accepting the premises and complaints of their users. I think the basic concept is intriguing, but the lack of intuitive execution is a huge show-stopper when competing with things like swype.

techaddict009 12y ago

Is is it inspired from Google's Gmail Tap April Fool Prank? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KhZKNZO8mQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KhZKNZO8mQ

1ris 12y ago
There is such a keyboard, i used it, and i case you take the huddle of learning morse code (that is very hard and requires LOTs of pratice that i unfortunatly don't have) it's absolutly awesome. Eyes free typing. I think that shouldn't be a aprils fool.

Hasu 12y ago

I can't figure out how I'm expected to use more than one digit on this thing at once. I usually type on a touchscreen keyboard with at least two fingers(either both thumbs, or the index and middle finger of one hand). The sliding action makes using two different hands impossible- I can't type many characters without having to move my thumbs out of each others' way. That won't work. This leads me to think that I should use one hand, maybe even four fingers. But then my entire hand moves position every time I have to slide, which means I have to move my entire hand back to the start position to use a different finger for the next character. The only way I can type with this system is using a single finger, and that's just way too slow.

tsm 12y ago

On the subject of alternative keyboards, I've been using MessagEase (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.mekb https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.me...) for about a year and am pretty pleased with it. It's still roughly the size of a regular QWERTY keyboard, but the buttons are enormous, and I can type any letter, number, or symbol I care about without modifier keys. (It accomplishes this by differentiating between taps and short swipes—so each button has nine characters assigned to it, the tapping one and then eight for swiping to each side/corner.)

Wilduck 12y ago
I've been using MessageEase too and I really like it. I was fed up with miss-keying on a standard Qwerty shaped on-screen keyboard, and I really haven't liked any predictive typing solutions I've tried. What I like about MessageEase is that the keys are big enough that I don't ever miss what I'm typing, which eliminates the part of typing that slowed me down the most--going back and fixing typing errors. I can whip out a 160 character text message in about 30-40 seconds with correct capitalization and punctuation, which is about all I can ask for in a phone keyboard.

cool-RR 12y ago

Public service announcement to all companies that are trying to sell us keyboards or keyboard-like solutions: I fully expect, when I go into your site, to see a video of someone using your keyboard to type FAST. (Which is probably the most important criteria in a keyboard.) This is essential because if your own people who developed the keyboard can only get to X wpm, odds are low that your average users are going to exceed X wpm. If I don't see a video of someone using your keyboard to type fast, I'm going to assume that you were not able to produce such a video, because your keyboard doesn't really allow for someone to type fast, which means that your keyboard is pretty much useless. Thank you.

intull 12y ago
They do have a video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUjBdMz1q8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUjBdMz1q8I
- sexmonad 12y ago
  That video is just auto-complete after the first letter...
  - intull 12y ago
    Smart! Didn't observe that.
  - mobilemaggie 12y ago
    Yes, it's a practice application with pangrams, with the auto-complete turned on. Here's a video of a speed test with everything turned off: http://youtu.be/xigziUyUcrM http://youtu.be/xigziUyUcrM (good point to get this more visible on the website)
- cool-RR 12y ago
  After viewing this video six times, I'd like someone to explain to me how the program knew to autocomplete "z" into "zippers" without consulting the users. Could it be that they've trained it for this specific sentence, making this entire video meaningless at best and a fraud at worst?

Splendor 12y ago

Neither the video or images were compelling enough to get me to install a free app. Show me someone using the keyboard.

diggan 12y ago

Hm, feels like this should make it more complicated to enter text. Let's say I have a telephone and it has 11 buttons. 0 - 9, call and hang up. This is easy for a person to remember and use. But, if we have a telephone with 4 buttons, 0 - 5 is one button, 6 - 9 is another, call and hang up is two others, the telephone becomes MORE complex and hard to use. One button, one functionality feels like the easiest and fastest way to type, mentally.

swombat 12y ago
That's 12 buttons :-)
evanb 12y ago
How quickly we all forget. It was not that long ago that telephones only had 0-9, *, #, call, and hang up. People texted like crazy anyway. Push the button multiple times to cycle through the letters, or enable T9 and let the phone autocomplete the word.

k-mcgrady 12y ago

Just downloaded it to try. WAY too high of a learning curve. For example to delete a character you swipe up on the first tile (likely accidentally activating Google Now). To show/hide the cheat sheet swipe down on the fourth tile. I can tell right from the start this is way too much information to remember. Swiping keyboards already work pretty well and are quite easy to pickup.

nzonbi 12y ago

This is an interesting design, independently if it may or may not be successful. In my opinion the keyboard should be reinvented. The qwerty and similar designs works, but not for everybody. I for example, took a course on using qwerty correctly, with all fingers, and without having to look at it, and failed. I can type fairly fast, but must look at the keys most of the time, and mostly use both index fingers only. The arrangement feels not intuitive for me, more like a mess. I can't never remember where a key is located exactly. All I can memorize are approximate locations. I am sure that at least for me, there could be better keyboard implementations. I have been thinking, and have some ideas. Both for on-screen touch, and physical keyboards. I may try implementing them soon. There is currently a cool trend on the PC market, in which companies are trying innovative form factors. The hybrid laptop-tablets are becoming popular. There are great devices on the market. MS surface 3, lenovo yoga and miix, asus convertibles, acer R7 and switch, are good examples. But the way I see it, these devices are saddened by the ugly and not cool qwerty keyboards. I wonder why those companies that have the resources, and are eager to differentiate on the market, haven't tried any alternative to the old qwerty. The world needs more creativity. For example, what does stop Microsoft, from offering a choice of alternative keyboard implementations as surface covers? In my opinion this is a big missed opportunity, and I hope these companies realize it someday. In the meantime, I may soon come up with a homemade alternative keyboard for my personal use. For those that the qwerty keyboard works, they should continue using it. But for those that don't, which I suspect are the majority, could use alternatives. There is an interesting opportunity in the market for those that realize it.

skywhopper 12y ago
I'm guessing it's harder to learn to touch type these days for folks who spend huge amounts of time using keyboards. While you're taking the course, you're partially hobbled by only knowing a few letters by memory, and you spend 90% of your day needing to actually type, so practicing your new touch-typing has got to be very hard to do. I learned to type with two fingers on computers in the 80s and could type pretty fast, but in high school (90s) I took a semester-long typing class, and while it was harder at first, touch-typing soon enough became so much faster it was well worth the effort to overcome my old habits. You're right that the QWERTY is screwy. It was designed to be. But while I agree alternative keyboards are something that should be researched, I also think learning to touch-type qwerty will be such a benefit to anyone who types much at all that it'll be worth the pain to do so, even though yes, it's probably way harder today than it was in the early 90s.

Siecje 12y ago

Doug Engelbart was right about the future.

gweinberg 12y ago

It seems to me that four would be a much better number than five, since our thumbs do not line up with our fingers.

smoyer 12y ago

I sometimes do serious work from my Android phone and the keyboard is extremely important ... I haven't found anything that approaches the convenience of this keyboard: http://www.meritline.com/logitech-tablet-keyboard-android-920-003390---p-75240.aspx?source=fghdac&gclid=CjkKEQjwqYacBRDO-Mrk6_vr8eQBEiQAWJadfI_zvT9tG0-kM5AUFaTKLU1Q6FVpBBml6r83endabIHw_wcB http://www.meritline.com/logitech-tablet-keyboard-android-92...

Roboprog 12y ago

So it's like having 10 or 12 buttons to write a text, only worse???

1ris 12y ago

Absolutly awesome. I tried serveral alternative keyboards since the day i own a smartphone, this is the first one I liked right from the start. Minuum seemed pretty lame, haven't tried it, but I tried Swype, Swiftkey, GKOS, 8Pen, and a morse-key keyboard. The latter was very neat in theory, but the learning curve was just to steep. Now, starting form thre and increasing the number of buttons from two to five and adding hints on for the fly is IMO genius. Two thumbs up. Now i want a smartwatch. I just wished there was a explanation what the difference between the light and the full version is. /edit: And I think i have a bug: The Enter key does not work, or is that a limitation of the free edition? Could be, I will buy the full version tomorrow. /edit2: No, it's just that i confused "enter" and "go".

moollaza 12y ago
I really think you should give Minuum a try. I've used most of the ones you listed above (Swype, Swiftkey, 8Pen, Fleksy) and ended up sticking with Minuum. I've been using it for almost a year and don't regret switching. I used to love Swype, but it started to get pretty slow and once I switched to Minuum, it was nice to see how much screen space I could reclaim.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
brenfrow 12y ago
I did the exact same thing, I had no idea there even was a "go" button, thanks for sharing this.