The team behind Minuum, a Y Combinator-backed mobile keyboard, writes about typing interfaces, prediction algorithms and UX.
HN commenters remember Minuum's one-dimensional keyboard fondly, praise its multilingual handling and screen space savings, and note it appears discontinued.
Minuum co-founder here:
Please check out our data collection policy at http://minuum.com/data/ . We actually wrote a fair amount of it ourselves to try and reduce the “legalese” aspect. Hopefully, as you suggest, we can work to increase transparence more in the future.
As someone below mention the key reason we introduced network access was to enable language packs.
We also collect some analytics, but it's limited to data which is inherently anonymous. We really want to build an amazing keyboard that people will want to use every day so it’s critical we be able to answer basic questions like “Is the keyboard installed?” and “Was it used today?”. Otherwise we couldn't validate our design decision.
As stated in our data collection policy, if we ever want to collect anonymized typing statistics or other data related to what you type, that would be strictly opt-in and we would be as transparent as possible about it.
And yes, as others mentioned, we only access contact information if you use the import contacts feature in the settings.
As a datapoint: we build the Minuum Keyboard (http://minuum.com), and our iOS version was written from the ground up in Swift. That is shipped in the App Store and has been since iOS 8 launched.
To echo much of the sentiment here: the language is definitely usable in production now. The tooling is not ready yet. We have wasted untold hours dealing with XCode crashing. If you're contracting this out keep in mind those hours.
There are also some issues with the bridging to Objective-C for Cocoa APIs. As an example: we've had a few cases where for performance reasons we've needed to replace Swift arrays with NSArray objects.
That said: there's a lot to like about the language and there are parts of our codebase that are really nice by virtue of being Swift.
EDIT: I want to agree with a number of people here about using the language your contractor is comfortable with. If you don't have a strong in-house reason to use Swift, Objective-C is going to be around for a long time, so I wouldn't worry about that.
Sorry for sounding like a shill for this comment.
as far as typing on silly surfaces, minnum has personally had my eye the most. tl;dr make the keyboard 1 dimension, and then use excessive prediction to correct the issues with that.
combining that with a watch with a distance sensor (up along the arm), you then would have a keyboard and trackpad in the space of a watch.
http://minuum.com/future-of-wearable-typing/ for explanation
I'm not following.
* Does this still expect you to hit every key but some of them need multiple taps?
* Are they doing fancy autocorrect-like magic to decide which letter you meant, and if so why use this instead of taking it one more step and using http://minuum.com/ ?
* Or is it something else?
I loved Minuum's one-dimensional keyboard! The app disappeared from the iOS App Store, but looks like it still exists for Android in the Google Play Store (last updated in 2017). Did the developer go out of business?
http://minuum.com/
Same for me. Especially because I could never find a competing keyboard that handles multiple languages so well. Only minuum (http://minuum.com/) could be an alternative for me since it is great to have more screen space.