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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • HeliBoard has been my chosen SwiftKey replacement: https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard

    Features I value:

    • Multilingual typing (as someone who writes EN, PT and dabbles on DE and NL daily, having to check which language I’m on and switch keyboards/layouts every time sucks)
    • Glide typing (with optional closed source library)
    • Clipboard history
    • Comprehensive layout customization
    • Autocorrect (with customizable level of confidence)
    • Emoji selection and history

    It does suck to see an app that I loved and paid for (yes, I used it for THAT long) get enshittified and try push AI* down my throat.

    Not to mention M$ owning my typing history (which I kinda could live with).

    RIP SwiftKey.




  • I keep using Eternity and even contributed some patches to it because it is Open Source and Android native, which might sound like a low bar, but really:

    Open Source

    • It’s free
    • I’m not the product. Really, even if some closed source alternatives have relatively cheap Ad and tracking free experiences, you’ll always be seen as the source of monetization. And I’m too weary of having paid for a good app only to see it try to twist my arm and squeeze more money or sell out to a big corp.
    • I can fix what’s broken. If I find an issue with an otherwise unimportant part of the app, but that matters to me, I don’t need to wait and pray it doesn’t get forgotten. I can fix it myself and end up helping the devs and whole user base in the process.

    Android native

    • It shows. I use a 5 year old phone that still kicks ass. But the otherwise good cross platform alternatives out there make the user experience more jittery than is excusable. Even PWAs (Web Apps) are snappier than those!
    • It is not a Flutter ListView powered timeline. Trust me, I’m lazy, and if cross platform frameworks were up to the task, I’d be among the first to endorse them. But they aren’t. Have you noticed that the timeline tends to “jump around” if you’re scrolling around on other apps? Yeah, the Android RecyclerView that Eternity uses doesn’t have that (apparently unfixable) problem.

    Thanks Bazsalanszky!