Swype - The next generation of text inputs !! :-)

People following me in twitter, facebook or my blog would have known that i recently joined the android community with the purchase of my htc wildfire. Ever since I bought my phone, there is this one thing that I'm madly in love with. It is supposed to be the next generation of input system for touch screens. With a simple tagline "Why type when you can swype", it is really one of the most amazing technologies I have ever seen in my life.

When I first got my phone, being the first time of using a touch phone, I was really happy about the basic touch input that is built in with android as it had a really nice auto corrector and I just needed to key in the text very very approximately. But the moment I installed and started using swype I never turned back. In this article I will be sharing an overview about what swype is, how to get swype for various smartphones and a few alternatives to swype.

What is swype ?

Swype is the most recent innovative technology for text inputs in touch screen based systems. Just like we have the T9 input system for traditional mobile phones, swype is for mobile phones with touch screens. In T9, there are either 3 or 4 characters assigned to a single numeric key and to key in text, you just have to press the correct combination of numbers associated with those particular characters and voila you have the text you wanted keyed in very easily. If there are multiple words possible for a particular combination then you choose the right word you wanted by either pressing the "*" key (in traditional nokia phones), or by pressing the down arrow (in sony ericsson and irritating motorola) or by pressing the "0" key (in the unconventional samsung phones). Once gotten used to, you will feel that T9 is the best way to key in texts in a mobile phone. It is indeed true and people even type without seeing the screen like we do in computers.



Swype is a similar technology for touch screen mobiles. In swype, instead of tapping each and every character in the qwerty virtual keypad shown in the mobile, you just have to elegantly trace through the path of the word you intend to type. Similar to T9, if there are multiple words in the path you traced, swype offers you the list of possible words for you to drag it into the input. You can be very approximate in your path trace yet swype recognizes your word almost perfectly all the times. Though it might sound simple and not very appealing at first, on using it you will realize that almost 90% of the words you type in have unique paths and hence, unlike T9, you very rarely will come across the ambiguous word choosing pop up.



Who can enjoy swyping ?

• Android
  
  • Swype comes as a default input method along side touch input in many android devices.
  
  
  • If it doesn't come preloaded in your android device, then you can get the official swype beta from http://beta.swype.com. The official beta is closed now but you can download it through someone who has already registered with the beta was open (yes, it is legal to get any number of copies with a single registration! - and don't contact me as I didn't register when the beta was open).
  
  
  • If you didn't register for the official beta when it was open and don't know anyone who did, then this is the option for you. Download the apk file from some other source and install it in your device (which is what I've done in my phone). I am not posting any direct links here owing to legal reasons. It is available easily in 4shared.com. Find out the type of display your device has (VGA, QVGA, HVGA, etc.), download the appropriate version and install it.
  
  


• Windows mobile
  
  • Few devices with windows mobile comes with swype preinstalled. I am not familiar about other options of getting swype for windows mobile.
  
  



• Symbian
  
  • Swype has partnered with symbian and recently released a public beta for S60 5th edition based symbian phones (nokia 5800, 5230, 5233, N97, N97 Mini to name a few). You can download and install swype for symbian from Nokia Beta Labs. All the installation instructions are also briefed in that page.
  
  
  • One drawback i faced with swyping in symbian is that, most of the symbian devices have less sensitive resistive touch screens when compared to their capacitive counterparts in android devices. Although, it is convenient to swype with nails in the symbian devices which is not possible with the capacitive based android devices.
  
  

When is swyping easy ?

• When you are just done with a call and your phone is slightly wet out of your cheeks


• When have completely dry hands after a long rest of hands (e.g. after a sleep)

When is swyping not so easy ?

• When you have just washed your hands and wiped it dry using a kerchief/tissue


• When your hands are wet of course


• If your fingers are a little bit bigger, then you may have to switch orientation every time you key in text

Alternatives to swype

Every emerging technology is never unique these days. There are always multiple implementations of a single technology and swype is no exception. Here are a few alternatives if swype that I have tried out.

• Dasur SlideIT Keyboard
  
  
  • This is the best alternative for swype I have seen so far. I was using this before I could figure out swype installation in my device.
  
  
  • One feature that it had and swype lacks is shortcuts. You can store tiny shortcuts for frequently used lengthy words.
  
  
  • The dictionary is no where close to swype's preloaded dictionary of 60000 words. Although, many language packs are additionally available for free.
  
  
  • It is available for all major smartphone platforms (android, symbian, windows mobile and even for windows ce). It can be downloaded from the official market of your smartphone ( android market, ovi store, etc. ).
  
  
  • For more details visit here.



• T-Swipe Pro
  
  
  • This is a swype alternative that is available only for android devices as far as i have explored.
  
  
  • It is a stable piece of software that is terribly slow in recognizing what you swipe.
  
  
  • The trial version shows you irritating pop ups asking you to register for full version which is definitely not worth upgrading to.
  
  
  • If you badly want to swipe and both swype and slide it key board doesn't work in your device ( which is a very rare case ), then this may be your final destination. I am damn sure you need the patience of handling a tortoise to use this.

To conclude, Swype is definitely one of the major breakthroughs in mobile technology and I am pretty sure that soon enough, swype will be the de facto standard for text input in touch screens. Hoping to see more and more OEM installed swype devices soon.

Note:
This article has been composed entirely in a mobile device using the following input systems:

• This note is keyed in using the traditional touch input system for android


• The section about SlideIT Keyboard was keyed in using SlideIT Keyboard itself


• The section about T-Swipe Pro was keyed in using T-Swipe Pro itself


• The rest of this article was keyed in using none other than swype itself :-)

P.S.: Thanks to AK Notepad.

-Vignesh

Google Chrome's Second Birthday !! :-)

Google chrome celebrated its second birthday two days back. Its been exactly two years before I read the official post in google blog stating that it is going to launch an open source web browser. I was surprised and was very excited to try it out at that time. Ever since then, i have been using only google chrome for all my primary internet work. And as a trademark google product, it has shown very rapid scale of development and it has matured a lot since the first release.

Along with its second birthday, google chrome version 6 has been released on the same day. The first thing i liked about google chrome release is the comic strip that they released along with it which beautifully explains the internals of google chrome in such a way that from tom, dick and harry to gnu, kde and dll guys can understand. If you have missed the comic strip, you can have a look at it here.

Google chrome currently holds 7.52% of the total market share of web browsers (Source). Surely it is very less when compared to Internet Explorer (60.4%) and Mozilla Firefox(22.93%) whereas chrome is relatively new and has had just two years when compared to Opera which, after 10+ years in the market, holds just 2.37% of the share. The key to chrome's success was that it always focussed on speed and simplicity. Apart from that the HTML5 support is being top notch. Since the project was started almost when HTML5 started to evolve, it is easy for chrome to easily adapt to HTML5 rather than other browsers whose code roots dates back years.



Here is an excerpt from chrome's official blog on its second birthday:
"Since Chrome’s first beta launch for Windows, we’ve brought our Mac and Linux versions up to speed, and continued to make the browser faster, simpler, and safer across all three platforms. We’ve also introduced a boatload of features, including a more customizable New Tab page, browser themes, side-by-side view, password manager, better privacy controls, built-in Adobe Flash Player, Autofill, automatic translation, HTML5 capabilities and synchronization of various settings such as bookmarks, themes, extensions and browser preferences—just to name a few. Finally, there are now more than 6,000 extensions in our gallery to enhance your browsing experience."

It is really amazing how big a product can get in a matter of two years. To me, when you are a company as big as google, i don't think there is any such thing as a small scale product release. Everything you do is in the scale of billions and trillions. Google Chrome has made my road in the web much better.

Here are some useful extensions that i have been using:

• Google Mail Checker - Google Chrome version of Gmail Notifier


• Google Similar Pages - A beta tool that suggests you pages similar to the current page


• Google Translate - A really awesome plugin that suggests you and translates if a page is in a non-english language


• TabJump - An intelligent way to group and navigate between your tabs


• TinEye Reverse Image Search - More about this here


• Chrome Bird - A twitter extension

Share your two year memories with Chrome on comments :-)

-Vignesh

A Plant that lives on Facebook !! :-)

I recently came to know this plant that relies on facebook for its life. We all would have learnt in our secondary school that plants live with carbon-di-oxide and photosynthesis. But now, here is an innovation that connects the virtual and the physical worlds.

With the basic theme as, plants don't just grow with the things that we have learnt in our high school botany. Coming under the category of living things, they also require love, care and attention to grow. Connecting the offline and the online worlds has always been something i wanted to do and this is a project that has made me look at it with an awe.

This project, named Meet Eater, has been running since May and currently (September 2, 2010) has 3041 likes (including mine). This has been developed by John Bashkim belonging to the University of Queensland, Australia. The plant grows based upon the human interaction with it using facebook. It gets it nutrients when people become friends with it, write in its wall, etc. It even replies back to your posts (of course by a backstage human controlling its profile).



This is how Bashkim describes the plant:
"Meet Eater is a plant, but not one we're used to. This plant is watered upon the receipt of physical interaction, when it makes friends on Facebook and when people write on its wall. Behind this project is the idea that by introducing both physical and virtual levels of interaction the plant is able to make the move from being an object to being a creature. A creature you can become friends with on the Internet no less."

The facebook page has a link to view the live cam, where you can see the beautiful innovation in action. The Meet Eater garden is situated in the State Library of Queensland.

The facebook page also says:
"Meet Eater is rigged up with a system to register physical contact and social media interaction. Watering is triggered by human contact and nutrients are delivered when you start hanging out with it on Facebook."



So, go hang out with Meet Eater and thereby help it grow. Here is a link to the facebook page of Meet Eater.

Note: Thanks to mashable and allfacebook for the pictures.

-Vignesh