This is a thread for people testing TouchPal's beta. This is not an "applying for beta" thread, if you don't have it installed, you're in the wrong place.
From my PM, I got the following:
----------------
** Feedback **
The main goal of having beta testing is to collect valuable feedback. Your feedback is important to us! To submit your feedback, please email to (removing address to prevent spamming).
Besides TouchPal Keyboard, TouchPal Dialer is another app that helps you find contacts quicky in T9 keypad, display caller location, and much more. Search "TouchPal Dialer" in Andorid market and it is free!
Again, sincere thanks from TouchPal team!
Best regards,
Jessica Wu
TouchPal
-----------------------------
Personally, I'm having some luck emailing Jessica (and got a reply), but also having a lot of bounces. I'll try to get a note through to CooTek that I started this thread.
I'll post my email & reply in a moment.
oops - double posted. sorry.
What I sent earlier today:
Only been playing around 30 minutes, so will try to send a longer one after using a few days, but some quick thoughts:
- I kept typing "This is a test" to see if the keyboard would learn. I know on Swiftkey (which I own) that the first time I type it, it's the default next time (ie, when I type "This" then "is" "a" "test" will all be top suggestions in that order.
On TouchPal, the word "Test" didn't show the first couple times, then it did show on the right, and slowly moved to the left of suggestions - so I think it's learning. I don't know how the settings are, but might need some tweaking.
- With tracing turned on, you obviously can't slide down on letters to get alternate symbols But holding down works just fine. Likewise, with tracing on, you don't get to see the predicted next word until you hit a space.
The problem with that - with tracing keyboards I usually do trace-trace-trace, never hitting the space bar. Spaces are auto-entered. To get the next-word predition, I have to do trace-space (see if the word I want is on the list & if not go back to tracing). I'll have to try this for a few days, but right now it's faster to just trace the next word I want then hit the space & see if the word I want is up there.
On, with tracing on, no idea how to change keyboard layouts.
- Toolbar area, please change the buttons. Make the language one be settings with one click & language with 2 clicks. I don't need another settings button where words will be. Likewise, I don't need a tutorial button there. I do like the middle buttons for cut/copy/arrows. Maybe a button to turn tracing on/off or change layouts?
- Percise mode. One of the BIGGEST things I use in SlideIT is the ABC/Sliding button so I can turn off tracing and go to exact input. Very useful for web page addresses, user name, password, names - anything where you temp. need your exact clicks. Maybe make your TouchPal symbol a toggle to turn this mode on & off.
- Is it me, or is the bottom left A/Book button the same as the Shift button?
===========================
The reply:
Thanks for the feedback! Here're some quick response:
On TouchPal, the word "Test" didn't show the first couple times, then it did show on the right, and slowly moved to the left of suggestions - so I think it's learning. I don't know how the settings are, but might need some tweaking.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Please note that in the example, "a" is followed by "test". There are many possible words after "a", so inputting "a test" for once doesn't necessarily mean you will have "a test" in the next time. If "test" is promoted too fast, this would be a disturbing option. If you try some other combination, such as "This is a quick test", I believe "test" will be immediately promoted after you input "quick".
The problem with that - with tracing keyboards I usually do trace-trace-trace, never hitting the space bar. Spaces are auto-entered. To get the next-word predition, I have to do trace-space (see if the word I want is on the list & if not go back to tracing). I'll have to try this for a few days, but right now it's faster to just trace the next word I want then hit the space & see if the word I want is up there.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's true. Because we need to give you an option to change the traced word first.
On, with tracing on, no idea how to change keyboard layouts.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Slide from the toolbar button, such as shift key.
- Percise mode. One of the BIGGEST things I use in SlideIT is the ABC/Sliding button so I can turn off tracing and go to exact input. Very useful for web page addresses, user name, password, names - anything where you temp. need your exact clicks. Maybe make your TouchPal symbol a toggle to turn this mode on & off.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You do have such a toggle button on the left-bottom-corner with A and a book (indicating dictionary). Is it not obvious enough? Do you have a better suggestion?
My verdict.
I like it but currently swype is better.
Improvements
* the ability to add words to dictionary by manually typing it.
* Auto correct is to sensitive. A slight delay when typing gives you an extra letter. swype is smoother.
* auto capitalisation after fullstop
* symbols done the usual way, its a nice idea but annoying when having to scroll through pages, try to add more on each page.
to be honest i thought i would type this with TouchPal so i could see bugs whilst typing, and I'm starting to like it. autocorrect the only annoyance
Swyped from my MIUI Galaxy S II
dh2311 said:
* the ability to add words to dictionary by manually typing it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As far as I can tell, it already does that. Type a word (no matter whether you are in dictionary mode or not), and next type you are typing it it will suggest the word. Or when swiping it next time, it will also come up.
My comments:
I agree with most of the things that are posted here. I had one crash of touchpal today, it occured while i tapped and hold the backspace key to get rid of a few lines of text. Touchpal closed and didn't give me an option to send a crash log, unfortunately. Tried it a few times more, and sometimes when "backspacing" a lot of text, it will crash. Pretty reproducible.
I just don't completely understand the dictionary button, I don't find a difference in behavior whether it's turned on or off?
And when clicking a word (that was a mistake), it would be neat if other suggestions would come up so you can easily correct it, like swype does.
Thusfar, I think SlideIT (my normal keyboard) is better. My big thing is wanting the next word suggestion but I can't see an easy way of doing it and suggesting fixes for the Slide.
My only thought so far would be to split the suggestion line and make the first 2-3 suggestions fixes for the current word and then the next 2-3 words suggestions for the next word. Color code them so you know which are which.
I suppose you could also do two lines and let the user decide which one or both they want to see.
I will keep this one as my default for at least a week to see how it goes. I've found some other differences that would require adjustment. Spacing particularly going from single taps to tracing and back seems to be a bit inconsistent.
For a beta version, it's running pretty smooth. Suggestions and improvements can always be added
I was trying to type 'sim' today and it absolutely would not let me. When I hit the s key, it typed an a. No amount of tweaking would work. If I managed to get the s to work, I'd type an i and then tried to type the m, but it automatically inserted 'sin', and would not let me type 'sim'. Very frustrating.
Plus, there is a typo - I can't find it now, but somewhere the word 'editing' is misspelled 'editting' (two t's).
That reminds me - any way to remove a word entered by accident?
This app makes me miss Ultra Keyboard, wonder how he's doing. That was the one that tried to cram in every dang option from every keyboard out there. I seem to remember that the tracing was pretty bad at getting the correct word, but sure had a lot of options. Don't think it had next word prediction though.
This is my review I posted on reddit
Here is my review after ~1 hour of playing with it
I know I can come off as bashing this, but I'm not. I'm just giving my honest, personnal impression of this beta. I'll also be comparing it to swype only since it's its main competitor
PROS
- The install was flawless (no registration or anything for now). Swype is annoying for this, particularly when it fails to generate license or w/e. Flashing new roms regularly on my phone, I've had a good share of failed installs of swype. Pain in the ass to remove as it's usually a system app (not uninstallable without Root explorer/Titanium Backup/etc.)
- I haven't seen crashes/bugs
- It has been fully responsive without a hint of slowdown unlike swype (sometimes I get a slight lag on swype)
CONS
- I couldn't find the "blank keyboard" shown in the video. I'm thinking it was just a way for them to show you can type blind with the keyboard
- The predictions are pretty bad for short words (2-4 letters). Swype is also not so great at this, but usually better
- The default dictionary seems like it needs much more training than swype. I frequently flash new roms on my phone and usually I barely have to train swype to get to a satisfactory level when typing. This wasn't the case. I'd say swype predicts correctly about 70-80% of my words out of the box while Touchpal is probably around 50-70%.
SWYPE VS TOUCHPAL
Here is some unscientific tests I did with a few sentences with both keyboards out of the box. Using "swype" method and not tapping amongst the suggestions (letting the keyboard pick its best guess)
"Why are you so mad?"
* TOUCHPAL: Whiff ate youtube sop mad?
* SWYPE: Why are you so mad?
"Reddit is the place to be"
* TOUCHPAL: Reaffirm its the place to be
* SWYPE: Freddie is the place to be
"This is a test of an android keyboard"
* TOUCHPAL: This its the testy of android keyboard
* SWYPE: This is a test of an android keyboard
"Let's do one more test for Reddit"
* TOUCHPAL: Lewis dull one mower test for restitution
* SWYPE: Let's do over more test for refit
TL;DR
Promising but swype still far "better". I'm hoping for improvement as I hate Swype installation.
i agree with what you say, TouchPals correction is poor, tries too hard to find what you're trying to say, shouldn't try to lengthen words, just ends up guessing words that begin around where you started. its a good idea but flawed by its predictions. shouldn't go longer than amount of letters you stopped on
Swyped from my MIUI Galaxy S II
Quick questions:
Is it me or with tracing on, is there a way to quickly change keyboard layouts (from full keys to TouchPal+ to T9)?
Is there a way to do tracing while in TouchPal+ mode (2 letters per key)?
After using this for a while, I agree with a lot of the comments here.
1. The auto-correction is too sensitive. Always giving me words that I am NOT often using even as I swype over and over again.
2. I cannot seem to swype words like "Haha" "Hehe" "Lol". Can't even seem to add them to dictionary. It never seems to learn that I like to use those words often.
3. I set my Keyboard Layout in Portrait to FULL QWERTY. When I am on an active telephone call and I want to use the keyboard, it will auto switch to 12-Key PhonePad for me.
So for now, I am still sticking to Swype app. =) Oh I hope there's a quick way to tap the to have a smiley inserted immediately rather than tapping that Smiley > Going into a Smiley Menu > Tap a Smiley. Swype can do it it in one tap of a button.
Currently reinstalling after a reflash earlier but i've got to say what stood out the most (negative) was the desire to lengthen words. I understand that its a great feature to type "ackn" and get "acknowledge" but so many times i'm trying to write something simple and the first suggestion will always be much longer and obscure (can't remember the one earlier for "hey").
Maybe some sort of gesture to let the keyboard know you're trying to write a longer word using less keystrokes? I don't know how many words start with double letters, maybe a quick double tap on the first letter before sliding? Trying to think of situations where that would be worse than what we're experiencing.
Given that this is a phone/tablet keyboard and most users right now are on phones using this for texting and/or quicker e-mails, I think you are more likely to see people simplifying their speech automatically rather than trying to swype a really long word like "got it" instead of "acknowledge"
Will post more meaningful thoughts when I get a chacne to play with it some more
2 things that really bug me:
- not able to correct a word when i tap on it. have to delete the whole word and re-swipe it.
- not able to input custom words.
yeah.. tried to send feedback via the email they gave and it bounced back twice. :l
TouchPal, it was doing great until it comes to learning new words. The promotion system sucks as the word I really use often move very slowly to the blue recommendation box. For those who are fast typist, use super simplified words, this app is not meant for you. Its a damn slow learner. But can be fixed if they implement SMS learning in it. Plus, if I edit some existing word, it will just create another new word, without taking the existed word into account. Even if I just want to add an -es into it.
Sent from my HTC Desire HD using XDA App
Really annoying to hit space after every word. Especially with a small space bar. Need continuous swyping!
Samsung Captivate using XDA App
No french dictionnary
thanks for adding me to the beta team.
i could use it for daily use if the german dict would also be released. so i only can test a few sentence because i only use english 5% of my typings.
a must have for me also is a configurable smiley button. want to change some smilies.
the thing i also miss is: when typing some words, and you want to correct a word typed 3 words before, that you put the cursor somewhere into the word and get the correction list as in smartkeyboard pro.
i would also like to see the cursor arrows all the time like in smartkeyboard pro. optionally.
sent from my SGSII via T*patalk
I'd like to add this in case any Epic 4G users happen to read. I found that TouchPal affected my hardware keyboard by making the 'fn' and 'shift' keys lose their functionality. I was unable to capitalize letters and make symbols with it. Was fine before I installed TouchPal, and it was fixed after I uninstalled TouchPal. Tried re-installing it several times to see if it was just a mishap, but after 6 times the problem was always there.
Current build is Froyo 2.2.1, [EC05]SyndicateROM Frozen 1.2, Twilight 1.1.1 Kernel.
Other than that, some very nice features. Love the up/down slide on keys for capital letter/number/symbol shortcut. Would love if a future version had full text shortcuts when pressing they key and scrolling up, down, left or right. For now though, no go. I need my slide-down keyboard :3
I really like the jelly bean keyboard. I just miss one feature: after writing a word, for example a name, it is not possible to make the first letter uppercase by pressing the shift button. So you have to erase the word or try to get the cursor to the exact position. Both takes plenty of time especially in non english languages.
Is there any keyboard app which has this feature?
pdppdp said:
I really like the jelly bean keyboard. I just miss one feature: after writing a word, for example a name, it is not possible to make the first letter uppercase by pressing the shift button. So you have to erase the word or try to get the cursor to the exact position. Both takes plenty of time especially in non english languages.
Is there any keyboard app which has this feature?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Generally speaking I think that you have to press the shift button before you press the first letter of the name, not afterwords (I'm pretty sure you already know that, but since I don't have jb I don't know how it works there). Apart from that in my humble opinion Smartkeyboard pro is the best keyboard replacement app. It's not free (link to trial version) but it gets the names uppercase and has tons of languages. If you don't want to pay you can try swype you can either type as usual or swype over the letters and you can make a letter uppercase by simply swyping over the shift button - and it offers several languages.
I would recommend SwiftKey. You don't need to do much besides just type letters... You don't even have to hit space. It'll auto add spaces, capitals, punctuation, as well as the BEST (not opinion, this is fact) predictions on any android keyboard.
Shifted from Outer Space
Hi everyone. I've had some issues trying to use my Transformer as a true laptop replacement for work and I wonder if anyone could help.
I found that the included Polaris Office is absolutely terrible for my needs. It appears to lack any type of support for foreign characters (à ã â á, etc). I can't type them and any text that has them comes up garbled.
So I tried to find a more apt replacement and came up with Kingsoft Office, which had some nice reviews. I installed the Multilang version available in the app store, but I still have some issues.
Kingsoft displays accented characters just fine. But when I try to type one, I get the accent, then the letter (e.g. "´a" instead of "á"). The weirdest thing is that I can type "á" just fine in the search/replace box, just not in the document. I've adapted to writing the text normally and then changing all "´a" to "á" and so forth, but it takes some time and I'm afraid I'll miss some somewhere. I've also tried switching from the ASUS keyboard to Android Keyboard and Swiftkey, but those don't even recognize the layout for my (Portuguese) keyboard dock (shift-2 gives me "@" instead of the double quotation mark, @ should be ctrl-2).
So, short question: is there any way to type accented characters directly in a document in Kingsoft Office using the Transformer's keyboard dock? Does this work in any other office suite?
Long answer: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1982542 Hey, the ALTGR shortcuts stopped working...
Short answer: No.
Also, they give you shift-2 "@" because that's the international QWERTY layout.
ShadowLea said:
Long answer: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1982542 Hey, the ALTGR shortcuts stopped working...
Short answer: No.
Also, they give you shift-2 "@" because that's the international QWERTY layout.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks, I realize that the Android and Swiftkey keyboards are defaulting to an international layout. What I can't for the life of me understand is why I can't type accented characters with the ASUS keyboard, since it works fine in the search/replace box but not in the document
To elaborate: normally, i'll press the accent and nothing happens, then I press the actual letter and get the accented letter, so "´"+"a" gives me a single "á". This works in the search/replace dialog box. But in the document, when I press the accent I immediately get a ghost accent, then when I press the letter I get a plain boring one: "´a".
daemonios said:
Thanks, I realize that the Android and Swiftkey keyboards are defaulting to an international layout. What I can't for the life of me understand is why I can't type accented characters with the ASUS keyboard, since it works fine in the search/replace box but not in the document
To elaborate: normally, i'll press the accent and nothing happens, then I press the actual letter and get the accented letter, so "´"+"a" gives me a single "á". This works in the search/replace dialog box. But in the document, when I press the accent I immediately get a ghost accent, then when I press the letter I get a plain boring one: "´a".
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had the same problem when trying to type in French using Polaris. I went to settings and ticked the box to use the system language. In the languages for the asus keyboard and system keyboard I chose English Canada and French Canada. To type in French I change the system language to French and the keyboard changes automatically. When you type the accent, the cursor changes to a blue box and when you type the letter, it appears as a properly accented letter with the accent directly over the letter. To get the à, you won't use the + key though, look at the choices on the keyboard. I think it's the " key but I'd have to check. The ? is the shift+6, etc. I didn't experiment with other keyboard languages though since these are the ones I'm familiar with.
Hello All ,
I have dwelled into the world of swipe typing and i love it! Works great for english and other proper languages,
Issue arises when i use a made up language called Arabizi , Which is arabic words represented in english characters and numbers,
Using swype i have made a huge dictionary with the words commonly used , a word like "3aref, ma7lool etc." is possible to save in a dictionary and is recognizable when swiped.
I have tried all swipe based keyboards and only swype is able to recognize such structure.
Issue with swype is that it does not have a dedicated number row, and as you can imagine i use these numbers extensively.
So i turn to samsung's own keyboard with swype baked in ,but upper number rows are not recognizable when swiped ,So i was thinking, since i am able to get secondary symbols using Wanam xposed module, Is there a way to modify these symbols to be like swype (where secondary symbols on top characters are numbers)? if you know where i can find such a file to modify that would be amazing.
Thanks, And i am open to suggestions if you have any alternative keyboards in mind!