For the past week, because of a hardware failure, I have been using my tablet a lot for online things, whilst my PC is out of commission. I'd generally avoided using it, for typing-heavy things like forums, for the obvious reasons, but now I've been forced to.
And now I am proudly told the above "You've saved 10,000 keystrokes with SwiftKey", and invited to share my stats.
Firstly, it probably (I havenvt tried it) wants me to have a Facebook, Twitter or Google+ login, which I donvt have... (Maybe I have Google+, as part of the Android tbing, but I'm not even set up to comment upon Apps I use, on the GooglePlay storefront, it asks me for a login when I accidentally tap on "rate now".)
Secondly, as prolific as I can be, on forums here and elsewhere, I can't have possibly saved that many keystrokes. I never use the suggested words atop the keyboard1. Is it counting the number of keystrokes I could have saved, but actually didn't? Or the auto-spaces (see below) thatI've often not needed/duplicated/deleted, anyway?
Thirdly, the editing! So much exiting! If I rush an apostrophe (hold down the v-key) it stays as a 'v' (see two parageaphs up) and adjacent letters are much to easy to slip onto. Then therevs damnit there's the space-adding behaviour of punctuation. I put zpaces after commas myself, normally because I type correctly already, but it always puts them in itself, and after brackets (including square ones, making BBCode writing difficult, even ignoring neexing to hit two keys to get the keyboard with [] s (auto-space not redacted) and then out again to get the / key for a close-tag) and quotes (including single quotes, i.e. apostrophes) when it tbinks I need the... Either being wrong or leaving me to type them in again, unseeing until I notice the mis-spaced text as I cbeck my editing process...
And "i.e." is difficult. "i" then "." then delete the space (it also undoes the auto-caps!) then the "e" and another "." with handy space (that I might add to, if I don't intend a comma to follow directly) but then tbe need to hit the shift twice to continue in lowercase for the next word... A relatively minor problem (six keys to give five characters, not counting initial double-shifting if the i.e. was at the (perceived) start of a sentence and needed de-captalisation) but indicative of costing, not saving, my keysroke needs.
I have another tablet (for other tasks) that isn't equipped with SwiftKey's keyboard (looks like it's Samsung Keyboard, being on a Samsung, and all) which doesn't try to 'help' so much, even if the []s are still two keys away from being usable still) and I'm tempted to switch over to that for leisure/pleasure use.
And going back and editing efrors... Errors... errors later is godawful, but some of that is the nature of the cursor in the editting boxes, which I'm not sure is the realm of the keyboard (although the cut'n'paste mechanism on the samsung works better). I wouldn't normally leave anything uncorrected, once spotted, but you'll notice I'm letting a lot of fhem *ahem* them slip through, recently.
And does it count the keys I type to replace utterly borked text, in its calculations of how much I must have saved?
So, everybody, pleas let me inform you of my 'success' in using SwiftKey, before I reach the next milestone within this post alone!
(The AV on my main PC, the one out of commission (but not because of virus!) also keeps announcing "see how many threats I've protected you from!" and then tells me that it has scanned many millions of files, in its lifetime, but still blocked/quaranteened just the same one 'threat' (which wasn't) that it had found years ago. But it also seems so proud. Even funnier was before that detection (JohnTheRipper utility, on a memory stick, being there for legitimate security purposes) it would proudly say the same (or similar, the message may have changed across tbe various auto-updates) except with zero detections proudly proclaimed!)
So, yeah, just getting that out of my system. Good old SwiftKey. I'm just about getting used to it, unswiftly, and I actually hope I can forget about it shortly and get back to a proper tactile keyboard with nothing worse than a wobbly space-bar.
(Is anyone even goig to read this? Probably not.)
1Case in point, my typing of the word "suggested" did not originally feature that word even at the "suggeste" stage, but originally just "sure steering-induced" and "sure steps", and as I can't reliably touch-type on my on-screen keyboard I can't afford to look up at the suggestions, anyway.