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Thumb-Key: A privacy-conscious Android keyboard, made for your thumbs

76 pointsby se7entimeabout 2 years ago

17 comments

theamkabout 2 years ago
Neat idea, shame about all this misleading information though.<p>The website very strongly implies (1) the only way to predict words is by uploading every keystroke to central server,(2) every keyboard other than theirs do that and (3) the only way to get privacy is to download their product.<p>This is all complete lies of course. The prediction database is small enough that you can bundle it with app and run all prediction locally. The &quot;upload each keystroke&quot; part is completely optional -- some keyboards have no such functionality, and some keyboards require explicit opt-it via the easily findable checkbox.<p>It&#x27;s a pity that the authors of such original ideas have to resort to lies to promote their product.
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orbital-decayabout 2 years ago
<i>&gt; Smartphone companies like Apple and Google, in an attempt to better their word prediction algorithms, as well as collect potentially profitable information on what their users were typing, began submitting and aggregating all their user&#x27;s key-taps to their servers, violating user&#x27;s privacy in the process.</i><p>Neither Google&#x27;s nor Apple&#x27;s keyboards send your keystrokes to the server, that would have been too outrageous, even for them. Gboard is kind of leaky, as it uses &quot;federated learning&quot; where the keyboard finetunes a prediction model locally, then the results are sent to the server and merged there; this is literally a long-term profile of what (and how) you type, and can probably be used to identify you elsewhere. But even then it doesn&#x27;t send your keystrokes directly.
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tmikaeldabout 2 years ago
For iOS i found this excellent T9 keyboard recently:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;se&#x2F;app&#x2F;type-nine-t9-keyboard&#x2F;id926008509" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;se&#x2F;app&#x2F;type-nine-t9-keyboard&#x2F;id926008...</a><p>Also work without any network access, lookups are on-phone
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jacknewsabout 2 years ago
&quot;Double tap the space bar to type a comma, triple tap to type a period. More taps have more punctuation.&quot;<p>lol reminds me of the Mactini : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BGGOn-H7s3Q">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BGGOn-H7s3Q</a><p>Only joking, this looks cool.
pshirshovabout 2 years ago
Just for the future record. The repository owner removed my comments and blocked me when I said that it may be unethical to ask for unpaid pull requests and other contributions if the developer explicitly says that he is going to charge users subscription fees.<p>If you want to make unpaid contributions into this project you should carefully consider this.
balou23about 2 years ago
For the love of god... just show me how it works. Yes, based on a previous product. Yes, privacy is nice. Highly configurable. History of phone keyboards...<p>&quot;Tap, or slide &#x2F; swipe to type a letter.&quot; Slide&#x2F;swipe how? &quot;Swipe up or down on A to capitalize.&quot; So is A acting like a shift key? Or is that for every letter? How to capitalize the letters then that I somehow have to slide&#x2F;swipe on?<p><i>Show me</i> how it is working.
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ciesabout 2 years ago
Dessalines, the author, also is the main contributor of Lemmy (an open source Reddit clone in Rust that&#x27;s on the Fediverse). He&#x27;s a very ideologically motivated programmer, a socialist, and I admire him very much.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dessalines">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dessalines</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;join-lemmy.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;join-lemmy.org</a>
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Jeff_Brownabout 2 years ago
Is anyone actually faster on this (or Messagease) than on a normal phone keyboard?<p>I may have put more than an hour into it already, I&#x27;m still only at a bit more than half my speed on Gboard, and my speed with Thumb-key already may have plateaued. It&#x27;s easier to make mistakes on Gboard, but the speed makes those mistakes worth it anyway.<p>I did spend something like infinity time learning to type on a normal keyboard, so the comparison is uneven, which is why I&#x27;m interested in other peoples&#x27; experiences.
foo42about 2 years ago
I used to use a very similar looking&#x2F;functioning keyboard way back on my Palm organiser and then on my Pocket PC. I don&#x27;t recall the name of it now, but I got be being quite fast with it. It didn&#x27;t have any autocomplete IIRC.
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grishkaabout 2 years ago
I experimented with a similar concept myself[1] but couldn&#x27;t get myself used to it. The neat thing though is that it doesn&#x27;t require a dictionary. You get what you type (or swipe), there&#x27;s zero guesswork involved.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;grishka11&#x2F;status&#x2F;1517531884246421505" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;grishka11&#x2F;status&#x2F;1517531884246421505</a>
kqrabout 2 years ago
I&#x27;m missing some information on how this relates both to GKOS and particularly KeyBee! I did a survey of these different input methods many years ago[1]. Shame things haven&#x27;t developed much since!<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;two-wrongs.com&#x2F;rethinking-text-input-on-touchscreens.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;two-wrongs.com&#x2F;rethinking-text-input-on-touchscreens...</a>
pshirshovabout 2 years ago
That&#x27;s awesome<p>It would be nice to add more messagease layouts, multitouch 2-pane mode, more symbols, and layout customization features.<p>Lack of question mark in the standard layout drives me mad.<p>Also it would be good to have an option to disable animations, they are extremely distracting.
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Arch-TKabout 2 years ago
Written using compose, neat. Maybe I can add a layout configurator to it at some point.
mrjinabout 2 years ago
WOW, a keyboard claims to be privacy-conscious, wasn&#x27;t that dodgy enough?
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C-x_C-fabout 2 years ago
It&#x27;s unfortunate that holding down backspace does not keep deleting characters (or better yet delete word by word like Swiftkey does)
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georgeoliverabout 2 years ago
Do people still conventionally type on phone keyboards? 90% of the time I&#x27;m either swiping words (on Gboard) or using voice to text.
lotr577about 2 years ago
Will this ever come to IOS?