Swype-like virtual keyboard

I appreciate that you are thinking about it.. Swype is extremely essential for average (mainstream) consumers if physical qwerty keyboard is not available.

Great! Because it would make the whole wiping experience complete. Actually, Swype was the first thing I installed on my old N8 four years ago.

An unlike swype-ish keyboard would make typing a breeze with the smaller Jolla phone I'm hoping for. Wouldn't matter much that the keys are small. Painting words like that was really nice on my old Nokia 700. ...and much smaller than that is hard to find.

would even pay 50 cent for buying an "official" swype licence per download/device ;)

As tronicum said, I would even pay a little bit more to be able to swype on the keyboard. That's a must! =)

I'm following the progress of your efforts closely as this type of text input is more or less a necessity if there is to be a smaller jolla phone in the future. ...and I'm very much hoping there will be.

Thanks for your efforts on this. If you are willing to open the code I'm sure you would get some help even if it is just with layouts and dictionaries.

Yep... The code would definitely be open - once it is ready OR if i get too busy with other projects. I'm hoping to get some progress with making a maliit plugin out of this for this weekend . So will regularly post updates on this.

Where can I donate?

Hopefully in the About dialog of the app? :)

So here is the quick update: Last week was a little too busy for me => a bit slow for Skeyer... So the one line report for last week: The build system issues were fixed. I am planning to soon do the development in the open once the basic plugin is in a working condition (~2 more weekends)?

gabriel, thank you for the idea, i have voted to swype forum with swiss french keyboard but is look like better to use swiftkey not free for foreign language support french language

Sadly Swype have stated "At this time we don't have any plans to create a Sailfish OS specific version of Swype". I still think Jolla should be talking to them to help encourage them to do it. I'll repeat again that the Swype keyboard is a much more natural match for Sailfish's gesture-based interface than a traditional hunt'n'peck VKB

strongm: must be in response to the email I sent to their PR (or maybe somebody else's). Ah well, we can only wait/hope ;-)

I would love swype-it was such a key feature on the n9 and made my Apple friends take notice

In the thread linked above Swype have now commented that, as a result of the thread, they are looking at this forum to help gauge the level of support for a Swype keyboard on Jolla. Whilst in no way a commitment to providing one, it is good to hear.

This should be a comment, not an answer ;)

UPS - you are right. Sorry :-~

One can contact the author on TMO: talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=92764

I'm the author of this keyboard. If you want to help, please visit the link posted by zlatko.

Any update?

Something happened. It was said on Jolla Pioneer fans Facebook page that eber42 is working on a newer version and the link to source code can be found there, too!

I tried your guide and I got an alert:

make: ***  No rule to make the target "/home/francesco/okboard/corpus/corpus-it.txt.bz2", needed by "it-learn.txt.bz2".  Stopped.

Any suggestion?

Thank you for your explanation. Unfortunately it didn't work for me yet. I get the following error:

Building for languages:  de
~/sailfish/okboard/okb-engine/ngrams ~/sailfish/okboard/okb-engine/db
running build
running build_ext
running build
running build_ext
~/sailfish/okboard/okb-engine/db
~/sailfish/okboard/okb-engine/cluster ~/sailfish/okboard/okb-engine/db
make: Nothing to be done for 'first'.
~/sailfish/okboard/okb-engine/db
make: '.depend-de' is up to date.
set -o pipefail ; lbzip2 -d < de-learn.txt.bz2 | /home/olaf/sailfish/okboard/okb-engine/db/../tools/import_corpus.py de-full.dict | sort -rn | lbzip2 -9 > grams-de-full.csv.bz2.tmp
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/olaf/sailfish/okboard/okb-engine/db/../tools/import_corpus.py", line 209, in <module>
    ci.parse_line(line)
  File "/home/olaf/sailfish/okboard/okb-engine/db/../tools/import_corpus.py", line 64, in parse_line
    raise Exception("Line contains invalid characters: %s" % line)
Exception: Line contains invalid characters: deu_wikipedia_2010_1M-co_n.txt0000644000000000000000004332467211570554667015100 0ustar  rootroot715        132
        21      18.76
/home/olaf/sailfish/okboard/okb-engine/db/makefile:43: recipe for target 'grams-de-full.csv.bz2' failed
make: *** [grams-de-full.csv.bz2] Error 1

Which corpus file did you use? I tried this one:

http://corpora2.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/downloads/deu_wikipedia_2010_1M-text.tar.gz

Corpus files are compressed plain text files (.txt.bz2) and not tar files. So you can just join different sources before compression. They should contain only sentences separated with dots and/or blank lines, and with proper capitalization.

If you produce and distribute your own language files, I suppose you can use the license you like.

The README file has been updated a lot lately and there is some additional information in the TMO thread (http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=92764).

@Olsen: I used http://corpora2.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/downloads/deu_wikipedia_2010_1M-text.tar.gz - like you. Maybe I need to rebuild and test my description again. According to @eber42 we need to unpack the tarball and prepare deu_wikipedia_23010_1M-sentences.txt (deleting the counters - cut -d $'\t' -f 2 deu-wikipedia_2010_1M-sentences.txt).

@cy8aer I think @Olsen already stripped the counters, because id tried to build that corp too, also stripping the counters. But I am getting almost the same error.

That's why I wrote "swype-like" ;) It doesn't need to necessarily be Swype (the plugin with that name), but some sort of "slide keyboard" input method. Maybe developed internally.

For example Android has an input method similar to Swype, but developed internally and available as an option to the stock keyboard (at least in my Nexus 7 with Jellybean/Kitkat, my first android device, and I hope the last).

Edited my answer. Indeed Google's keyboard provides similar swype-like keyboard, but it is not opensource either.

How did Swype end up on the N9? Presumably as the result of some negotiation between Nokia and Swype. Is this not something Jolla can consider? Or at least gently suggesting to Swype that it might be worth their while making a Jolla version. It just seems such a natural fit to me.

This is not an essential feature to me, I understand others may feel differently. It is just that predictive text does not work tht well if you have use more than one language... Half my communication is in Italian and half is in English, and more often than not, words are not in a dictionary.

In any case...

• Swipe^TM is going to be expensive to license
• swipe-like is going to require resources developing...
• I still have hopes for a keyboad other half :-)
• Resources at Jolla are limited. Budgeting for this means something else will need to be postponed or scrapped...

From my point of view, this is a feature better offered by a third party.

The minuum keyboard looks nice. Have you tried it, @mikma?

I did, for a short moment (because I funded the software and I own it because of that). Because it did not support Finnish dictionary, it was not that usable for me :(

How did it feel when typing? Was it accurate?

Wow, this could be even faster than swiping - nice. Also I assume this shouldn't be to hard to implement on top of the existing dictionaries (not knowing the implementation details). Just wanted to try it on my Android tablet, but it requests some permissions it dfinitely should not need. (Off topic: this just reminds me of how cool it was to have app permissions at all.. ahem ;-))

It was quite odd to use for the start, but any new unknown software is :) I can't tell what it was like because it's been a long time, and now it's changed abit from the beta I used. Maybe I should install it in the old phone and retest it again to see what's it like.

Swype needs to be licensed as far as I know. And please clarify - are you suggesting YOU can implement it or just pointing that it must be done as mallit plugin?

Would it be possible to implement the stringing of words at all within the maliit framework?

I can't implement it. Lack of time for sure, and most likely skills. Swype implemented it closed source for the N9. I was indeed pointing that it must be done in a similar way, opensource would be better and could benefit all the devices using maliit.

There is also TouchPalX and FREE. http://www.touchpal.com/en/index.html

Maybe that one?