The mobile keyboard revolution
I’ve spoken a lot about Chinese IMEs on Android before but the really exciting developments lately have been in English/European keyboards. I’m referring to the numerous continuous gesture-based keyboards which have tipped up with Swype being the most famous. These are, to be frank, pretty revolutionary. They’ve utterly transformed what you can do with a mobile phone now and for me, at least, gone a further significant step towards obsoleting the trusty campus netbook.
I’ve tried out all the ones that are available: Swype, Shape Writer and SlideIT. The latter two can be simply downloaded from the Android Marketplace right now for free. Swype needs you to head to their site and sign up to the beta, at which point you can download an app which itself requires you to log in to your beta account on your phone, download the Swype keyboard and installs it. They had a bit of trouble with the various ROM cookers slapping Swype in their ROMs so they seem to have gone all medieval on their ass which is kind of understandable.
I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty that Swype is the best of the bunch. That’s not to say Shape Writer and SlideIT are bad, they’re both way better than using a tappity-tap qwerty keyboard but they are certainly less polished. The keyboard graphics are a bit on the naff side, or even weirdly blurrily resized, and ultimately they’re let down a little by deficiencies in being able to accurately and quickly deal with punctuation and capitalisation – as well as generally being more temperamental in getting the right word. Ordinarily I’d say go download one of those since it’s just a tap in the marketplace, but I’m confident enough that anyone will love the input system enough – you may as well go and sign up for Swype and get a copy of that.
Eventually they’re going to charge, one presumes, and I really have no problem with that idea at all. I’ve paid for things which have given me a lot less utility than Swype has. I mean… I actually reply to fairly complicated emails in a reasonable length, with one hand while walking back to Melbourne Central from UniMelb… which is quite a way removed from what was possible with the old tappity-tap keyboards.
In other pretty exciting news, a chap I know on Google Buzz has just today kicked out a beta of his Han Writing app, a Chinese/Japanese/Korean/English handwriting IME. It’s kind of bewildering, very advanced stuff. Essentially you can draw squigs that look a bit like cursive Asian script and it will pick them up. Obviously this is most of use to people who are more at home squigging Asian characters than they are using a qwerty keyboard. This, sadly, is not me by any stretch. However if you’ve any interest in this sort of stuff you should definately search for Han Writing on the Marketplace and give it a spin. It’s impressive work.
Which brings me full circle to the area that most affects me with keyboards on Android and that is how to efficiently handle multi-lingual input. I type a lot more English than Chinese, but I type enough Chinese, and typically embedded within English, that it’s actually quite irritating the process of switching keyboards with the long-press system. Han Writing is quite interesting in this regard because it offers a qwerty tappity-tap keyboard mode where you can type pinyin and Chinese characters will appear for you to tap. Unfortunately at present the qwerty mode is really pretty basic for English, so it’s not really a solution, but it highlights this niche.
What I want is this: I want Swype to be able to process pinyin. I’ve thought about this a bit and I think it’s probably unreasonable to have Swype just operate in a mixed mode Chinese/English because lots of the pinyin is going to look like some sort of English. It would be better to have a simple mode button you press to switch. At which point the keyboard only looks at the very limited set of pinyin phonetics. Obviously the way prediction works with pinyin keyboards is slightly different, we break things down into words rather than individual characters. Since there’s like a bazillion different “shi” individual characters but not that many “shishi” ones.
If one restricts to writing actual words, the point you lift off sends a confirmation just like English. So when you squig out jingchang and lift off, pretty much it’s clear you mean 经常 and that should appear. I was also wondering about a further idea, taken from the way that Swype handles capitalisation. You can perform an additional gesture by scramming a finger to the top of the screen to indicate a capital. I wonder if you couldn’t add four gestures, maybe even the corners of the keyboard, to indicate a tone.
I have the sense that this wouldn’t be necessary a lot of the time, but sometimes it would make the difference between needing to select a character from a pop up list or inserting the correct one right off the bat. Particularly for, say, single character verbs and the like. Of course this is pipe dream stuff, it seems the IME guys working on English and the IME guys working on Asian languages are very distinctly different people. The only mixed-mode keyboards I’ve seen so far are the Chinese guys who often put in a sort of barely functional English keyboard. Interestingly the developers of the Android Sogou replied to me a couple of days ago about a list of suggestions to fix their English keyboard. Some four months after I sent them the email. I think that sort of thing summarises the priority this area is getting from people in either camp.
