My review: The Bluster Boy by Davey MacManus ►

◄ My review: Cherry MX Experience keyboard switch selection

On most keyboards the backspace key is at the top right. It used to be like that in Gboard, but now it isn't. This isn't far off the experience of some bastard swapping a US ANSI keyboard for a UK ISO one, or otherwise switching keys around. Screen shots borrowed from this Reddit post (reproduced below) illustrate the problem. Mobile devices fall under Fitt's Law as much as desktop environments, and 'home' areas of a screen matter.

So I've installed SwiftKey, where the extended layout keyboard is reasonably close apart from comma position and at least that mimics a real keyboard. And turned off as much of the AI data slurping phone home shit as is evident, and begun teaching it to swipe swearwords (I've had it treat swiped input as completely different swearwords on more than one occasion, so its training algorithms are already fucked). For starting from scratch and being apparently heavily programmed to resist this it's not doing too badly so far. It does have a certain amount of lag when learning that I don't ever recall Gboard having and there are definitely inconsistencies in approach. But I try not to use small devices for much text input or anything important anyway, so it mostly works. Microsoft may also be an evil empire and Windows is proof that they'll interfere with user interfaces, but they do tend to pay a bit more respect to backwards compatibility more than Google.

It's worth noting that MS are so desperate to get people to create an account and sign in (I haven't) that they prevent users from choosing most of the skins available unless you do so, with a dark pattern of asking to slurp data again after that request is cancelled. Like I say, evil empire. Without exaggerating, people today are living in a panopticon in which relatively few care that devices include key logging as they type and that a lot of websites capture input as it's entered, not just when a form is submitted.

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