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OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy

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Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy

#121
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's amazing. And this also works on the default Android/iOS keyboards too.

Hm, tried it, but it doesn't seem to work that way on the AOSP keyboard (LineageOS/Android9 here). Either hits '.' or the language change button, or I get the "select keyboard layout" pop up due to a long press on space. Will check out OpenBoard, because this sounds like a great feature.

On lineageos there's an option somewhere in the system settings to make the volume buttons move the cursor when the keyboard is open.

Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's amazing. And this also works on the default Android/iOS keyboards too.

It does not work on the default iOS keyboard. You can't just slide your finger around the spacebar, you have to long press on the keyboard and hope you don't trigger the alternate character popup instead. Then while you're moving the cursor around, half the time it will just start selecting text. Moving the cursor sucks on iOS.

I'm an android guy, but force touch moving cursor on iOS works very fine. Better than spacebar sliding. Just press harder on on keyboard and it'll hide keys and let you desk the cursor around, mouse style.

Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy

#123
post #60

Holy crow, the feature where you can move the cursor by swiping back and forth on the spacebar is AMAZING. Seriously, I have always struggled with moving the cursor in text on either android or ios. This is great!

I've been using OpenBoard for over a year and I didn't know this!

Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy

#124
I love OpenBoard but their development has been very slow in the time that I've been using it. It's really solid for the most part but there's just a couple of features (like swipe-typing, and emoji search) that I wish it had. Still though, better than GBoard spying on me.

Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not work on the default iOS keyboard. You can't just slide your finger around the spacebar, you have to long press on the keyboard and hope you don't trigger the alternate character popup instead. Then while you're moving the cursor around, half the time it will just start selecting text. Moving the cursor sucks on iOS.

I'm an android guy, but force touch moving cursor on iOS works very fine. Better than spacebar sliding. Just press harder on on keyboard and it'll hide keys and let you desk the cursor around, mouse style.

All in production iPhones don't have force touch.

Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy

#126

Great project. It's funny that we are at a point where even keyboard apps are spying on your personal and private data. Crazy.

In theory, they keep your data private, combine it with the greater learnings of the world, and provide you with perfect autocomplete and autocorrect. In practice though, it just doesn't work. I got GBoard for a while because it has a bilingual keyboard, but the autocomplete suggestions often ended up being people's first names instead of common words (and not even the people I was talking to).

I speak French much better with GBoard, because it spells better than I do. It also has a pretty good sense of grammar: it will often autocomplete the correct ending of a verb. (It feels like cheating to use it with Duolingo.)

Of course I speak only simple French, and those are the cases where its primitive learning is most apt. When I speak English, its suggestions are less useful, because I use a much wider vocabulary and more sophisticated sentence structure.

Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an android guy, but force touch moving cursor on iOS works very fine. Better than spacebar sliding. Just press harder on on keyboard and it'll hide keys and let you desk the cursor around, mouse style.

All in production iPhones don't have force touch.

I also thought it worked better than Android on the SE 1.

Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not work on the default iOS keyboard. You can't just slide your finger around the spacebar, you have to long press on the keyboard and hope you don't trigger the alternate character popup instead. Then while you're moving the cursor around, half the time it will just start selecting text. Moving the cursor sucks on iOS.

I'm an android guy, but force touch moving cursor on iOS works very fine. Better than spacebar sliding. Just press harder on on keyboard and it'll hide keys and let you desk the cursor around, mouse style.

https://imgur.com/agqXWWJ

That's me pasting your comment into a reply box and then using my iPhone 8 to move the cursor around. Once I start moving the cursor all I'm doing is moving it, nothing else. You can see that it starts selecting text randomly twice. It actually took me longer to trigger it this time than usual.

I think it happens when I moved to the top of the text and then make a downward motion. It's really, really annoying on a regular basis.

Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if I hate ads and I think one should be able to ban them forever on their devices, Android could just add an "Internet access" permission that only counts for Internet access required outside the Ads API, so they would keep their ads and users could be a bit safer on the "this app is snooping my data" side.

That would only work if they open up the Ads API to work with any ad network. Otherwise it would basically kill any competition in the Android Ad space, which would probably lead to EU and US regulators coming down hard on Google.

They could instead expand the permission system to group various ad api's so that each api is considered a distinct permission. Honestly would be good to do that in addition (i.e. separate from) the general internet permission.

Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an android guy, but force touch moving cursor on iOS works very fine. Better than spacebar sliding. Just press harder on on keyboard and it'll hide keys and let you desk the cursor around, mouse style.

https://imgur.com/agqXWWJ That's me pasting your comment into a reply box and then using my iPhone 8 to move the cursor around. Once I start moving the cursor all I'm doing is moving it, nothing else. You can see that it starts selecting text randomly twice. It actually took me longer to trigger it this time than usual. I think it happens when I moved to the top of the text and then make a downward motion. It's reall…

Likely you have a defective unit, which somehow breaks the force touch input.
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