Wasn't this company the one that also made the original Swype keyboard for Android? I remember it having it's own "Dragon" Dictation system built in after a while.
back
1 comments
Nuance acquired Swype and then shut it down.
Disclosure - I worked at Swype and was part of the acquisition.
https://www.theverge.com/2011/10/06/confirmed-nuance-acquire...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/20/nuance-ends-development-of...
Sorry to hear that.
Swype was _by far_ the best keyboard for all-screen smartphones, and I miss it very much. It was markedly better than any other swiping keyboard implementation, as well as a substantially better feature set.
If MS silently switched Swype recognition and features into its Swiftkey product, but maybe kept Swiftkey's prediction engine – the only good thing about it – I would be happy to buy it again.
I think you can still get it if you look into your past purchses on google play, and I think last year I even managed to somehow download language packs for the multi-language support, indicating that the servers that host those are still up in some form?
EDIT: Yep- Just checked and downloaded the app & the german language pack successfully, will be fun swiping again. Neither swiftkey or gboard could replicate how good swype used to do it.
Oh yes. On Android, my licence still works, even on new devices.
But I got an iPhone 6S+ about 3Y ago – and the last time I owned an iPhone was before iOS supported replacement keyboards. After a lot of fussing around, I managed to copy a friend's installation onto it, but every time I restarted the phone, he had to authenticate it with _his_ Apple Store ID and password. Not convenient at all.
Also, AFAICS, the iOS version misses 2 crucial features from the Android version:
• it doesn't seem to have the edit-keys screen, with a cursor square and dedicated keys for delete forwards, delete backwards, cut, copy and paste;
• or the dialling-keypad screen (with the numerals in a phone-style square, as distinct from the numbers-and-symbols screen).
I've not seen any other Android keyboard with these. Some other swiping keyboards now support looping over a letter to double it (very handy in English, which is full of double letters – e.g. "cuter"/"cutter", "planing"/"planning"). I don't think I've seen any others which used swiping upwards off the screen to capitalise a word. Nor can any other I've seen handle swiping down to a punctuation mark to include it and keep going: "cant"/"can't", "were"/"we're", "ill"/"I'll", for example.
Ah - damn. Was one of the few apps I never regretted spending money for on my phone. Must've been fun to work on while it lasted though! Do you have any interesting anecdotes from developing such an influential app that you can talk about?