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Posts: 568 | Thanked: 969 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ Toronto
#1
TLDR: I miss Swype. Lots of people miss Swype. We need Swype on Sailfish, or something similar which is just as good. Please post on Swype forums so Swype know that we are interested! Also, we could do something other than Swype as a community... maybe.

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Moving from N9/Harmattan to Jolla/Sailfish is turning out to be a fairly pleasant experience, but with some big and obvious bumps in the road.

My single biggest issue right now is text input. Like various other people on TMO, I miss Swype terribly; after two years of Swype, going back to hunt-and-peck on a vkb is painful.

I know that Swype is covered by patent(s) and it isn't just a case of "add some dependencies and port it from somewhere".

Quite apart from the game-changing brilliance of Swype's "draw words with patterns", I also miss the convenience N9 Swype's very well thought-out implementation of "hold key down to get more options", I see that vowel-accents are available, but not numbers of quotes (double-quotes are hidden behind two screens). I suspect this could be resolved by editing keyboard layout, although I haven't had time to get to grips with that yet. A further functionality I miss from Swype on Harmattan is "tap word to see replacement suggestions". Perhaps I missed something, but this doesn't seem to be a thing in Sailfish right now.

Most of all, though: I miss the speed and accuracy of Swype. As it stands, using my Jolla even just for replying to an SMS or other short message is painfully slow and error-prone compared to my N9. I have written just a couple of short e-mail on Sailfish, but that experience makes me think maybe I should put my SIM card back in my N9.

So: this thread is intended for discussion of how we get from the current hunt-and-peck situation to having an improved/advanced text entry, either Swype or some other similarly useful method. I started a new thread since the existing Sailfish keyboard thread linked above is more about vkb layout; I think there is value in holding a separate focused discussion here.

Can we get Swype? How much would that cost, assuming licensing is a possibility, and who might pay for that? What other options are there? What appetite is there - both at Jolla and in the wider community - for a side-project to deliver Swype or an open (or even a closed!) alternative along these lines? etc.

Edit: if you want to see Swype on Sailfish, please take 2 minutes to post in the Sailfish thread at the Swype forums. No guarantees, but if we don't ask, we don't get. Thanks strongm for the pointer.
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Sailfish want list: calendar bugfixes, glanceable agenda, Swype or similar
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Last edited by shallimus; 2014-02-24 at 21:13. Reason: Please post on Swype forums!
 

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