Ok. Not gonna lie. I’m typing this blog post from my phone, something which I don’t normally do. And the main reason for it being that I noticed that SwiftKey had an update. And further googling led me to find out that apparently Microsoft reverted the decision to stop SwiftKey support on ios. And reinstalling the app made it work again! Hurrah! Before reinstalling it wasn’t really working but yeah. It is working again!
I was so devastated when it just bugged out and stopped working previously. Like. The keyboard is just one of the things that you use everyday. And most of the time you don’t think too much about it. It’s there. It exists. And you use it happily ever after. Until it’s suddenly not. It just bugged out and kept reverting to the default keyboard with one ios update. I don’t even remember when that was. And it was only then that I realised that msoft had bought it over abs discontinued support. They reverted that decision fairly quickly according to Wikipedia. Just three months later. But obviously you can’t go three months without a working keyboard. So yeah.
In the meantime I tried many other keyboards. Like the google gboard and others. I quickly made the decision that I needed a smart keyboard. Those multi colored, super customizable but dumb keyboards were pretty but useless. I loved having a row of number keys at the top of the keyboard. If gboard had that instead of having to press and hold the top row of alphabets to get the numbers, I would have used that. But nope. I found it faster to just change to the next page instead… So much deliberation later I decided to just stick with the stock ios keyboard.
What I really loved about SwiftKey and really hated about ios stock keyboard was how quickly SwiftKey learns new words. Just once. Then it saves in the dictionary. With ios? I had to type the same thing for weeks before it finally learnt it. And even then it still doesn’t do singlish right. It would capitalize my lahs and lohs thinking they were special words. So annoying.
In typing this blog post though, I realised that there is one thing that the ios keyboard does better. The auto correct is way more powerful. And actually useful most of the time now. If anything that makes me go back it would be that…
I’ve also forgotten that there’s the very handy punctuation thing beside the space key on SwiftKey. Just slide to get! And? And, # @. Yeah. I just automatically go to the next page now. Oh wells. To stick with SwiftKey and my years of prior language training? Or go back to ios keyboard? For now I’m gonna be using SwiftKey. As it relearn my typing heatmap, the times when I need big phrases corrected – which is what the ios keyboard is good at, should decrease. And now that I’m making a concerted effort to use the quick punctuation key again, that’s coming back to me real quick. A small little slide for a comma. A big one to the left for! And a small slide to the right for? That’s pretty much all I use anyway.
That’s pretty much all I have to say for today. I still want to keep typing though. It’s like meeting an old friend. So much so that I actually, legitimately, just missed my stop. First time ever lol. Just lost track of time. Shit… Oh wells. At least I’m not in a rush to get to work today. And it’s a quick ride back. Look I’m already at the next stop. It’s only been a hot minute. Guess the distance between these two stops are shorter than I imagined. Not that I pass by it often. I just go to work and go home. Rinse and repeat. Such a boring life right.
Ok. Back at the right station. Wasted about 5 mins of my time maybe? Or was it 7 minutes? Not too bad overall. And I’m really running out of things to say. Besides that all my Is are appearing as J. Yup my typing is wildly inaccurate. Hence the need for smart keyboards.
Ok ok. I’ll end here and spare you the joyful reunion rumble. Till next time!
Update: I just checked my discord chat and found that it was 26 Oct 2022 when I was complaining about SwiftKey death. Gosh. Absolutely didn’t keep up with the news. Else I’d have switched back to SwiftKey immediately the moment it was revived. Geez.