Sunday, July 6, 2014

SwiftKey Keyboard V5 with Xiaomi Mi3

For all of you who didn't know, Xiaomi Mi3 with official Malaysian ROM already has a Swiftkey pre-installed. It's Version 4.4+ variant.

But here's the odd part, if you try to update the app, you can't because apparently Play Store sees it as a different Swiftkey thus no updates (FYI, the latest version of Swiftkey is V5).

So there's a theory that Xiaomi ripped off Swiftkey, modded it as their own.

Though that's very unlikely as I'd prefer to think that Xiaomi has a deal with Swiftkey for their older versions for cheap.

Moving on, I went to download the latest Swiftkey. And I have to admit, I love the default layout, stunning and clean!


Simple and clean layout


The abundance of themes available
It's worth to note that Swiftkey has revamped their business model by offering the app for free with optional in-app purchases.

To be frank, I love this idea.

This way, lots of people can enjoy the app "officially" and those who really enjoy it can continue to support the company by buying the themes.

And as a casual user, they gave me 10 paid themes for free. Maybe it's a marketing gimmick, but if it's free, why complain? :)


Keypress heatmap

Here's something new I just noticed. They implemented a so called heatmap of the keyboard layout.



The idea is that to show the user how accurate they are when keying the letters. The rounder and sharper the circles are, the accurate you are.

From my heatmap, you cas see it's a bit blurry of big. I think that's quite accurate considering I do have big hands, I used autocorrect lots of time & definitely used a lot of the "Flow" feature to.

In fact, the "flow" has been quite accurate. I think the cloud based sync learning has been useful as they can use the data to predict what word you're actually typing.

Nice.

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