FlickBoard

(Or: How I fell into the (mobile) keyboard rabbit hole.)

I don't really call myself a keyboard nerd.

I use a plain old QWERTY12 keyboard. The swedish version.3 It's probably not optimal, but it works well enough for me. At least well enough that I haven't really had a reason to learn anything else.4

Except.. I do have this one dirty secret. You see, I really don't like it when computers tell me how, or what, to write.5 I just want to press a key, and see that letter show up on the screen, goddamnit.

That's.. fine on a desktop computer.

It's how most keyboards and applications work there!6 At most,7 you'll get a red squiggle if it doesn't like the word, or maybe a green one if it doesn't like how you put them together. And usually that's at least pretty easy to turn off in some menu option somewhere,8 so I can get my calm back.

But phones don't really work like that.9

The screens are tiny. Try to squeeze twelveish keys into a single row, and they end up downright microscopic. And you can't even feel the edges between the keys, since it's all just a flat sheet of glass.10

So, you pretty much have to cheat to make QWERTY usable there at all.11

If the thing you typed almost looks like a word, why not just.. fix it for you. In fact, if you know the start of the word, you can adjust the size of the keys to make it easier to hit the letters that it expects you to type.

Hell, forget all about that whole tapping business at all. If you do one swipe over the letters, that's probably enough to dig up some words that look right.

As long as the words you're looking for are in the dictionary.

Ducking awesome, init?12

Personally, I'm not so keen on that future.13

But.. does QWERTY still make sense here?

Touch screens may take away our space and tactility, but they do give us things back in return. We can do gestures now!14

Could we use this to pack the letters together a bit tighter, and make the keys bigger instead? Surely that should make it easier to hit the right one.15

Well, yeah. If you just consider the basic directions, you now have 9 unique interactions16 for one button that are still pretty easy to do and distinguish!

Take a 3x3 grid of those buttons, and you've got more than plenty to squeeze in the whole latin alphabet, and then some.

So some people made a layout and keyboard based on that principle, called MessagEase:

It never really got beyond a fairly small niche17, but it worked pretty well! Finally,18 I could type on my phone, without all the cheating!19

But the good times couldn't last.

ExIdeas (the company behind MessagEase) is a corporation, after all.

And a few years ago, they altered the deal. No more typing for you. At least not until you hand over your credit card.

And I understand the need to pay rent. But I also think it's pretty shitty to hold people's decade+ of muscle memory hostage like that.

It really be all that expensive in the grand scheme of things, but the principle of the thing pissed me off. And if they can put it behind a paywall, they can take it away entirely too.20

So, uh, how hard could it be to do it yourself, anyway?

So, uh, yeah. I guess I fell into the keyboard rabbit hole, after all. Oops.21 Though it's been a few years at this point.22

If you want to try it out, it's called FlickBoard.

You can check out the code, or try it out immediately. And this time it's licensed under the AGPL, which means that I can't just take it away because I feel like it (though you can't, either).23

If you're used to MessagEase already then it should hopefully feel pretty familiar.

If you haven't tried a MessagEase-like keyboard before, I'm hoping that it's still a pretty soft landing. It'll take some getting used to any new layout, though.

And either way, feel free to hit us up if something doesn't look right! (Or poke us anyway if it does!)

1. If you don't know what that is, it's probably the layout of your current keyboard! It's named that because, well, those are the first six letters of it. ↩

2. Sorry, Dvorak fans.24 ↩

3. Yes, that means that semicolon and slash are hidden behind shift, and that square brackets require altgr. ↩

4. Well, I guess I did finally learn how to type loadkeys sv-latin1 on US-QWERTY without stumbling around for the dash, so there's that... ↩

5. I've had that opinion since before the LLMania, but it certainly hasn't exactly mellowed that opinion. ↩

6. With apologies to anyone using transliteration-based input methods. I don't speak any languages that require that, so I don't have any experience with them. ↩

7. Glares at Microslop and Google for trying to change that, though... ↩

8. At least there aren't any tigers to beware of! ↩

9. At least not the modern slate phones. Remember when "smartphone" meant you could just slide out a keyboard? ↩

10. Or plastic. Or some other transparent mineral. ↩

11. If you want to try "true" touch QWERTY on an Android phone, Hacker's Keyboard is a bit of an eye-opener. ↩

12. With apologies to Watterson, I think verbing is pretty great, actually.25 ↩

13. Or present. ↩

14. Like the swipe example from before, heh. ↩

15. Thanks, Fitts. ↩

16. Taps, swipes towards the four edges, and four corners. ↩

17. How many people are willing to go back to barely being able to type for like a month, until they get used to it again? ↩

18. I'm fudging the order a bit here based on my own experiences with it all. According to Wikipedia, MessagEase was released in 2002, a year before Android was founded in 2003. Let alone when Apple popularized slates-with-touch-keyboards in 2007. ↩

19. MessagEase did still contain an autocorrecter, but at least it was usable without it. ↩

20. To go back to Swype, that certainly didn't have a pretty end. ↩

21. At least it's cozy down here. ↩

22. How late is too late to write the announcement post? ↩

23. Though I absolutely understand that this still isn't really enough on its own to be me-proof, either. Just look at the current situations around Linus or Mozilla. After all, having the code doesn't mean that it doesn't take time and skill to actually get familiar with it. But I think it's still the bare minimum to do. ↩

24. Sorry, Colemak fans.26 ↩

25. I wonder if verbing is in the dictionaries these days?27 ↩

26. Sorry, Neo fans.28 ↩

27. Looks like at least Merriam-Webster says yes! ↩

28. Sorry, anyone who actually enjoyed this bit.29 ↩

29. See, this doesn't even go anywhere anymore!30 ↩

30. Unless?31 ↩

31. No, I think we're finally done.32 ↩

32. Slutstation, vi ber samtliga passagerare att stiga av samt kontrollera att inga värdesaker glömts kvar. ↩