Comment by curtis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by curtis | Hacker News Reader

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I use MessagEase[1] on my phone. I don't think I'm any faster than I would be with the conventional keyboard, but it seems like my accuracy is a lot better. It wasn't that hard to learn the basics, but I still have trouble with less frequent letters and symbols. Part of that is just that I don't text a whole lot so I don't get enough frequent practice outside of the most common characters.

Edgewrite and Graffiti both have the advantage of leveraging off of your existing writing knowledge, but I have to say after using Graffiti that it sure seemed like it would be a lot faster to just abandon writing as the metaphor altogether.

Actually, I guess that's what MessagEase originally was, since Wikipedia tells me that it was originally released for in 2002 for the Palm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagEase

MessageEase seems interesting. I've just downloaded it. The swipe gestures seem like they are slow, but maybe with practice the larger sized targets offset that. This comment was typed using the keyboard.

I'm going to keep this installed and see if I can get faster.

I also notice that there's no autocorrect, which I miss especially when it comes to typing the pronoun "I."

It will auto-uppercase stand alone "i", but, yeah, as far as I know it doesn't do general auto-correct. I've never been a fan of auto-correct, so I regard that as a feature. I recognize that that's a minority position, though.

Actually, the uppercase support is one thing that I dislike about MessagEase. For swipes you just swipe one way and then back to where you started, which is easy and natural. For taps (your most frequent characters) you have to draw a circle. I've found this to be error prone, and the fact that it's different for the two sets of characters tends to trip me up. If you text as much as a teenager, you could probably get this into muscle memory, but I can never quite get there.

Huh, maybe i am missing some configuration or setting, but it isn't doing that for me. I'm on iOS by the way.

I'm on Android, so maybe the implementation is a little different. It's a default setting for me, I didn't turn it on.

I did see and try messagease and it mirrors some of my ideas quite well I'd say. So from a mathematical point of view I really believe in it.

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