Alternative keyboard layouts for touchscreen devices

Alternative keyboard layouts for touchscreen devices.
Share your opinions and experiences.

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With swipe, word prediction and autocorrection, why would anyone want to waste their time re-learning how to write?

Swipe, word prediction, autocorrection, and voice input, instead of making typing more accurate and natural, are just ways of making you avoid typing. These workarounds that put the user away from the actual keys are all different ways of admitting that the layout is flawed.
Moreover, all these workarounds you mentioned are limited to dictionaries. It takes away your freedom of expressing yourself the way you want, limiting your vocabulary to what is known by the dictionary. Not to mention all the annoying and famous autocorrection issues everyone knows.

I only tested 5-Tiles, and I really wanted to like it. But it is terrible for languages with too many special characters.

I use MessagEase and I don't see me going back to the qwerty layout anywhere in the future.

how does it compare to t9?

It is very different, actually (and much more accurate and faster).
To type the big letters, you just tap them. The small ones are typed by swiping. For example, if I want to type the character "C", I swipe from "O" to "H". If I want to type "F", I swipe from "S" to "O", and so on. The good thing about MessagEase is that you can change all characters as you please, which is a key feature if you need lots of special characters readily accessible (as I do for programming and writing in my diacritic-rich native language).

how is that faster?
I mean, adding and changing the layout is neat I guess but the tree style typing from t9 was very fast.

And a little trivia: MessagEase was initially developed to compete with the T9 layout, being and optimized version of it.
More about its concept here: exideas.com/ME/ICMI2003Paper.pdf

It is faster because there is no need of making more than one movement per character. The T9 layout requires the user to type the same key repeated times to get one single character, which becomes worse when you need special characters (punctuation, accents, etc).

>are just ways of making you avoid typing
And in what way it is a bad thing? Why typing should be so necessary in the first place? If I can easily put what I want on the screen, that's good enough for me.

what?
Did you never use a phone prior to smartphones?
The T9 input system was a tree based input system.
Each key represented 3 letters.
The more letters in the word you wanted to type, the more accurate it became.
Obviously if two one letter words were on a single key you had to press more than one key.
But the system worked really well especially for multiple languages.

>I can easily put what I want on the screen
Can you? So you never had a problem with autocompletion or autocorrection messing with your text? The voice input never misheard you? You don't have to type letter by letter site addresses and passwords?

Of course I did, and I used T9 a lot to send SMS with my old phones.
I didn't mean you have to use multiple keys per character, but multiple movements -- in this case, on the same key. For example, for the letter "L", you have to press the key "5" three times. For the letter "Z", the key "9" four times, and so on.
With MessagEase layout, even for physical keyboards, you would need only up to two movements (even though it could use up to two keys in comparison).

Oh, now I realized. You must have used the autocompletion/prediction dictionary system, right? My focus is on typing every single character.

T9 is the name of the predictive text system.
You are thinking about the layout. The layout is called ITU E 1.161 International Standard.

I looked it up now and I was mistaken. I used to refer to the phone layout as T9.

yes of course I did.
The other way was slow as fuck and I can't even remember when it was deprecated.
Even the 3310 had the dictionary.
I asked how it compared to T9 because it looks like a very similar system, but instead of pressing 9 buttons, you have a unique gesture for each letter.
This layout were used with the T9 system.

>My focus is on typing every single character
In this case, you type just as much as you did when using T9 (one movement per character), but entering the character you want.
I can see the advantage there, but you have to memorize and perform more movements in comparison to T9, not to mention the weird letter positioning.

>instead of pressing 9 buttons, you have a unique gesture for each letter
>you type just as much as you did when using T9 (one movement per character)
Exactly, and that's why I like MessagEase so much, as I don't use word prediction and still can type fast and accurately.

So it doesn't combine an accurate input method with the ease of a word prediction?

I think it has a word prediction system, but I choose not to use one.

may I know why?

He literally just said that he prefers it to predictive text, probably because he doesnt want to correct the predictive word every 6 seconds

>you have to memorize and perform more movements in comparison to T9
If you meant more movement variations, yes (because the amount is the same).

>may I know why?
For the most part, because of the same reasons mentioned by I like to have control of everything I type, without the need of checking if the software chose the word I meant. As in a computer, I just look to the top of the screen (the keys are so big that I don't have to look at the keys). Besides giving me more freedom to type what I want the way I want, it makes typing much more fluid, natural and pleasant.

Wow, I remember when 8pen came out!
I got so curious that I actually paid for it.

And believe me: it sucks.

well, I think it's better to experiment with softkeyboards than to actually build useless junk like pic-related

This one at least has keys.

user, this is a blue board