[Osmium]

I wonder how difficult it'd be to write OCR-style software for Gregg. It'd have to be more sophisticated; character recognition alone wouldn't be enough, you'd have to do a bit of Markov modelling with most probable sentences/words too. I guess it's so niche no one will ever do it, but it sounds like a fun project.

[err4nt]

I used to have a palm pilot and I LOVED the 'graffiti' input mode with the stylus. You had an alphabet of simplified shapes and it made it very easy to enter something quickly without needing to ‘hunt and peck' on a miniature keyboard for the shift key or using shift keys to change modes.

I wondered why nobody brought gesture-based inout to iOS this way. I don't care about 'handwriting recognition' of my own writing, I want a more efficient input method, even if I have to learn it and practice to be good at it. I'm not content with tapping one button for each character I want to record :S

[xrjn]

I think an excellent input method for mobiles is Swiftkey. It has incredible accuracy, and it learns really fast as to what and how you type. Its intelligence beat all other keyboards that I tried, and I'm able to peak at over 60 WPM using SK with two fingers, and 40 WPM with 1 finger and flow. However, it gets tricky as soon as you get sloppy or start writing technical stuff, so I tend to stick with the traditional tapping method of input.

There is a little bit of a learning curve to get optimal speed, but once you learn all the nuances and the shortcuts, it gets absolutely great. Typing long and detailed text is now reasonable on a phone, and quickly replying to something takes no time at all thanks to flow in my opinion.

[eru]

A friend of mine swears by Swiftkey, too. They seem to have taken a turn for the evil on Android recently, though: still usable as ever, but bugging you every once in a while to try out new themes, or asking for overly broad permissions.

[SwiftKeyCM]

Hi there,

You can actually turn off notifications from the app by: 1) SK settings 2) Advanced 3) Uncheck the box

SwiftKey has also stated they are working on performance updates in the next release: http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-5-performance/

As far as the notification at the top of the screen this is a notification provided by the Android OS and cannot be turned off or hidden.

Cheers,

Ryan Community Manager @ SwiftKey

[harmegido]

yeah swiftkey is cool. I just tap normally, but you can be extremely sloppy with it (increasing speed) and it'll correct your mistakes as you go.

Only dig on it is that it leaves up a notification that you can't get rid of on some android phones. That's more an android issue from what I read though.

[JohnTHaller]

I've had far better luck with Google keyboard than with Swiftkey, despite having been a paid user of the latter for years. Google's correction methods are simple and quick. SwiftKey feels clunky. And, even with connecting SwiftKey to my Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc to learn, Google keyboard is still more accurate.

[robterrell]

I started on graffiti as a keyboard extension for iOS 8 during WWDC:

https://github.com/robterrell/graffiti-keyboard

Spent too much time simultaneously playing/fighting with Swift so it's far from complete (only has shape definitions for a half-dozen letters, and some are more accurate than others) but pull requests are welcome.

[ars]

> why nobody brought gesture-based inout to iOS

It's available for android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.access_com...

[hrjet]

Wouldn't character recognition be sufficient for Gregg? I don't know Gregg, but from the article ti seems like the interpretation of the characters could be left to the reader.