Intel open sourced Stephen Hawking’s speech system

Have they improved performance of SwiftKey? I had the paid version for years, was even a VIP (won a t-shirt and everything), but I switched off last year in favor of Fleksy as a faster, more lightweight alternative.

I believe that no technology is simple on it's own, it all depends to the abstractions that you are used to. Counterintuitive is dependent on how things are expected to work.

Data binding is not solid, but it is a quick hack to display data, the solution is using a business model and mvp or mvc.

What do you find complicated about the combo class?

Data grid view... It is a train wreck, but then again, there is not much need to use it if you have a proper model behind.

The layout engine does sucks... The only alternative I found is to use the dev express layout control. The rumor is that 4.6 solves this.

Win forms is solid and it has very little chance of disappearing. Areas of the screen can be controlled independly, which means ui encapsulation is there... Something not easily done in html.

Have a look at lazarus (http://www.lazarus-ide.org/). It uses a different language (FreePascal instead of C#), but for me it's much more productive, and the programs written run without any framework and feel much snappier.

My mom had ALS, and used single-switch input for a while, after typing and writing on paper weren't possible. She wrote out little notes about what she was thankful for, prayers, practical messages (she had Type 1 diabetes, and told folks her insulin doses), and recipes this way. Eventually she had to switch to giving messages to a human holding a letter board by looking towards them for 'yes' and away for 'no'--cameras or Hawking's infrared-laser-based system weren't really feasible.

We looked at some software called EZ Keys from a company called Words Plus. (I don't think she used it specifically, at least for long--I know she used another program, a DOS-based one called Living Better that ran in 40-col. mode that I can't anything about on the Internet.) EZ keys looked more or less like Intel's thing -- scan rows, scan items in a row, completions/predictions over at left. It even had an option to use a frequency-sorted keyboard like the Intel one, with the common letters pushed to the top left (since those are the first rows/cols to be scanned). Hawking apparently used EZ Keys, so it's possible the Intel folks intentionally gave their thing a similar interface to make the transition easy.

It is worth remembering that no user cares if it's WinForms or whatever. Some folks might like a nicer voice if they haven't gotten used to theirs like Hawking ;), but the main concern is just getting the message across. Intel seems to have worked on the right stuff: better prediction (Presage http://presage.sourceforge.net/, which looks interesting) and context-sensitive controls. The infrared-laser-based input method sounds cool, too.

This is a neat space: an optimization/prediction problem where improvements can be a significant help to someone. (There are also practical optimizations that don't have much to do with the general word-prediction problem: sometimes people have to say things about their care, food, etc., or generic 'hi' and 'bye', and it's good if those are fast.) A Web page or Chrome extension can do a lot--how close can you get to smoothly operating the Web with just the spacebar? the arrow keys and Enter? or plain old typing, but slowed down and using 0-9 for completions?

I've heard that nowadays, people with communication trouble and enough movement use text-to-speech on mobile gadgets with their nifty and highly refined predictive input and that's awesome.

Does this mean that SwiftKey is now open source, that what they've open-sourced doesn't include the actual prediction engine, or that what they've open-sourced is not the latest version? The GitHub page says they use Presage.