If you happen to have a bingo in your hand, this comment is a free mark in the “this is why foss apps are better” spot. Though you have probably seen one already.
I wanna switch to FOSS alternatives but swiping is either funky (FUTO) or not available for now (Floris). I ended up downgrading gboard to an older version since all this emoji stuff (especially the bitmoji sticker nonsense) really grinds my gears.
Get Heliboard and then download a gesture library such as this: https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard/blob/master/app/src/main/jniLibs/arm64-v8a/libjni_latinimegoogle.so
Heliboard is on F-Droid.
Thank you so much internet stranger. Just made the switch!
Oh my gosh, I don’t think info like this is found anywhere on the internet, thank you.
Did you try Heliboard? It can be setup to swipe, though I mostly tap type. When i have used the swipe it has worked well though. I have been using it for over a year now and really like it.
Swiping seems to work fine on Heliboard (I guess because it uses the same proprietary library as gboard)
See, I guess my problem is I never liked gboard’s swipe algorithms back when I used gboard. Cause man heliboard’s swiping with the gboard library really pisses me off sometimes lol
For about a decade now google has been changing shit for no particular reason, this is just the latest.
That’s just their way they keep it alive. If it were actually good, Google would cancel it.
One thing I did notice a while back, was seeing the 2022ish interface for YouTube and Google search and feeling how dated it was, still absolutely usable mind you, just clearly with a design ethos from an older era.
Most the time, I feel that changes Google make are absolutely arbitrary, rounding a button and then squaring it again, but I need to give them credit that there is something more, something about staying at the forefront of GUIs. It’s still all bullshit of course, the old one looks older but is identically useful.
The reason is their internal promotion culture. You cant get promoted without global impact, so buckle up we are changing things so we can get promoted not because it’s better.
That’s got to be the absolute worst KPI I’ve ever heard of.
It’s a KPI you develop in the 00s culture of move fast and break things when the competition is at your heels and you want to be at theirs. You want to be the search engine that made the email client everyone uses otherwise that email client might make a search engine everyone uses…
It was outdated in the mid 10s, and it’s the mid 20s now
God how many things have changed on my phone that I did not ask them to. Changing the font on the clock. Changing the lock screen layout. REMOVING FROGGY WEATHER BEING BACK FROGGY YOU FUCKS.
Marketing and design teams just have to justify their existence. Makes for annoying stupid changes.
Don’t get me started.
Gmail for business has been renamed at least four times.
Google Home changed layout for no particular reason and made everything an extra click away.
Google Assistant removed perfectly working actions, try turning on your A/C at 3am in the morning whilst you’re sleeping.
Android changes navigation modes making everything worse.
Gmail keeps changing its layout.
Google Admin moves sections around for no reason.
Google search returns worse results every week.
Google Gemini is infecting every service.
Google Sites removed simple blogging functionality without any alternative.
Free services for life are now paid.
Google Play moved the search button to the bottom but you still have to tap at the top to type your search, so it’s just an extra click.
Basically, they have nothing else to do, so they just throw shit at the wall to see what sticks.
Sticky touchscreen for haptic feedback?
Sir, you earned yourself an extra piss break!
They learned it from Microsoft.
I have avoided Microsoft software for 25 years or so, so I don’t have any reference point, but there was a time when Google lead the pack in innovation, that’s no longer the case.
Google lead the way at buying innovation.
Mhm.
Innovate, Dominate, Stagnate, Enshittify.
Classic tech company lifecycle.
The fuck? If you’re gonna change the shape of the keys, at least make them hexagons. Because as we all know, hexagons are the bestagons.
Also then the clickable area would be bigger reducing errors. I tried a keyboard that did this once. Was a rough transition, but I managed. Unfortunately I ended up going back since it was lacking some other features.
We didn’t ask for the red to pink colour fade on the Youtube playbar either but here we are…
HOLY SHIT. Thank you. That’s what that is. I thought my screen was wonky or my eyesight was failing. It’s not even really linear, it just looks like the last 3cm of the bar are pink
Huh, TIL that’s baked into YouTube. I thought maybe sponsorblock was doing it.
Good time for FOSS keyboard apps to get some more love
Heliboard and Futo were the recommendations from what I remember?
Futo has been my favorite so far compared to other keyboards. I haven’t used Heliboard yet, but it also looks like a good option.
I use the futo keyboard as well, but autocorrect and swiping is not good at all. correctly spelt words constantly gets changed for me, clipboard doesn’t see what I copy too many times and swiping inaccuracy is too frequent.
only reason I put up with it is for the futo microphone. mic app is in a league of it’s own
I had the same problem, but I found that turning up the advanced Parameter Values in the Text Prediction settings helps to keep everything spelled correctly. I’m currently at 10.4 for the transformer strength and 8.3 for the autocorrect threshold and I’m noticing a lot less issues… I haven’t tested out turning it up all the way yet.
I also have the Transformer fine tuning enabled.
The swipe feature definitely needs some attention.
They do have a crowdsourced way of helping to improve their swipe prediction, more info on the link here: https://swipe.futo.org/
You’ll notice that even the swipe prediction for Heliboard comes from a closed source library.
Damn imma have to save this comment
The voice transcription is just OpenAI whisper but yeah it’s pretty great. I used it to write this.
its just OpenAI whisper that runs locally on my device, as god intended lol
I haven’t had any of those issues. Out of curiosity, what version of futo keyboard are you running?
Futo works really nice! Glide is pretty decent, though not as good as gboard’s. Wish it had custom background images though…
Heliboard is basically the same, but has the ability to add glide. Plus suggestions/corrections are already implemented, so I prefer it over Floris (which I used for months before finding heliboard)
Anyone longing looking to add swipe library for heliboard Find it Here by picking raw and then uploading it to heliboard in advanced settings>load gesture typing library.
Sharing because it took me a bit to find it the first time.
Currently using Traditional T9 from F-Droid. Works well.
Even has a decent emoji picker, which is good. 👌 (However, i say that and couldn’t find the OK symbol…)But for a full board: Heliboard is my go-to.
Oh that’s cool, does your device have hardware keys then?
No, Traditional T9 has a virtual keyboard as well.
OpenBoard still works well for me. Including swiping and auto correct.
Circles are the worst possible shape in terms of making efficient use of the limited screen space available on a phone. The screen is rectangular and nearly everything we display falls into rectangular arrangements. Using circles just means there is less room on each key to show useful information, like the long-hold functions.
I’m not opposed to change, but change entirely for the sake of change usually produces bad results.
I’m right there with you. I hate the current trend of rounded corners on everything. I know designers say it is more aesthetically pleasing, but to me it just looks like wasted space.
Depending on what you’re looking at, the goal is rarely to have stuff crammed into every pixel of the screen, at least on products that are well designed
I know that’s rarely the goal, but maybe it should be more of the goal. Sick of every app and webpage having these yawning chasms of useless white space
I use GBoard (yeah I know, it’s just really good, but yes I am aware of the privacy concerns), but I use it without shapes. The letters and hold-characters are just… there, placed around in a qwerty arrangement. No “buttons”, so to say. I hope they don’t remove that functionality.
Heliboard is the best right now
idk I prefer florisboard more in general
but currently they don’t have any autocorrect or swipe typing
I wish there were a different gesture typing library to use… It makes so many annoying incorrect predictions.
It really is. Funny enough, I use the rounded style icons.
I hadn’t heard of this one before; but a search of the play store is giving zero results. This one require side-loading?
You can install it with fdroid.
Reminds me of this
Late-stage tech bros, devoid of innovation and flailing at their precious cup game.
I’m so over this garbage. RIP smartphones.
I like this. But this should be an option.
Don’t use gboard, rather download a keyboard from F-Droid and avoid the keylogging :-)
Which one do you use? I haven’t found one that works as well as the Google one yet
FUTO keyboard, Seriously, it’s way better than every other option I’ve looked into. Has material you design support.
Also a lot of cool in development features like on-device text correction and speech to text with local LLM processing.
Futo is great unless you constantly switch between several languages. 🥲
I’ve been using FUTO which is free and open source, has pretty good gesture typing, very good voice to text, and does not connect to the internet. I’m happy with it, but I’m also an idiot and most things make me happy.
Edit: I am wrong about freedom and open source. Don’t listen to me. I still like the keyboard though.
FUTO which is free and open source
It is neither free (as in freedom), nor open source.
It is source-available.
I stand corrected.
For the love of Christ how do I change the FUTO dictionary to recognize curse words?? It’s so unnecessarily puritan
Just open the main settings and there’s a category called personal dictionary.
I’ve had a bunch of curse words in there for months but they refuse to show up in swiping or predictive text
HeliBoard is pretty nice
g what? I only know Heliboard
I switched to Heliboard and I couldn’t be more happier! It is just as good as any proprietary keyboards.
I’m using Yandex Keyboard #FuckGoogle
Using a Yandex product is hardly better than using something from Google.
I’m aware, but I like how Yandex Keyboard looks. FOSS alternatives aren’t that pretty, at least for me.
Futo with amoled dark purple theme is actually slick as hell imo
