mccI just this second drew the line in my head from "Microsoft is one of the companies who is convinced ChatGPT is a good thing and is telling its shareholders it's going to try to shove this brand of 'AI' into everything it can" and "Microsoft owns my phone keyboard, since they bought SwiftKey" and, uh… shit, maybe I should audition AnySoftKeyboard sooner rather than later
At almost the exact same time they rolled out this update, Microsoft deleted the public support forums. The public uservoice/feedback/feature request thing. They appear to have just removed it completely from the support site and old links to it 404. What an interesting coincidence.
Yeah LOL look at this. They removed the public forums in such an incredible hurry that if you just log into the SwiftKey website, there's still a link to the nonexistent forums at the bottom. They must have done this in an *incredible* hurry. I actually was thinking along the lines of "interesting coincidence" but now I actually believe it is not a coincidence and they really did do this just to prevent people discussing welding Bing and "AI" into the FUCKING KEYBOARD
Yeah check this out. The app itself has a "Help and Feedback" section. But there's no way to provide feedback. There's only the "Support" button which links to a static site of prewritten pages. They made the decision to remove the public feedback site, apparently to prevent feedback around "Bing" "AI" integration, they didn't even have the time to tell the people making the actual app to change the button names.
I'm not as certain about this part, but there's a weird detail on the static-support-pages site if you search for something (such as "disable Bing"). Below the search results it simply says "Still haven't found what you're looking for?". EOM. I *think* there used to be something under there like a contact or support link. The line might refer to the links underneath but it doesn't really visually make sense. Now the left-behind line looks so forlorn.
Still haven't found what you're looking for?
This one hurts, it really hurts. I think this hurts worse than Musk buying/poisoning/killing Twitter. I've mentioned this before but a keyboard feels like an extension of your body, and I've been using SwiftKey exclusively for over a decade. I wrote most of this thread in GBoard and it was actually pretty rough to adjust to.
It's bad enough corporations can buy things you like and kill them. This seriously feels like a corporation buying a part of me and taking it away.
It really is true. In the long run, open source software is the only thing that exists. ( https://mastodon.social/@mcc/109683380376727036 ) It doesn't even matter if open source software is good. Eventually you'll have to use it it because there are simply not any alternatives.
Got several people recommending to me "FlorisBoard". Do I understand correctly you cannot install this through Google Play? It's fdroid/sideload only?
PunnO)))@mcc You'll be disappointed. I've tried all the FOSS android keyboards, and none of them is consistently enough better than the AOSP one to daily drive.
@mcc Not the same, but gboard might be based on it (like how Chrome is based on Chromium). AOSP keyboard is very basic, think iOS 6 style.
FOSS keyboards with swipe typing are pretty new (within the last ~1-2 years), and your options are FlorisBoard or AnySoftKeyboard. FlorisBoard is (IMO) the better of the two, but both are inferior to the features of gboard. I refuse to use gboard because I don't trust Google with my keystrokes.
@mcc FlorisBoard doesn't have word suggestions, so if it misdetects your swipe, you have to delete the word and try again. AnySoftKeyboard has suggestions, but feels a lot more sluggish and seems less accurate with swipe typing overall. Maybe some day these will be good enough, but I don't think they are today. I just gave up swipe typing when I started ripping corporate snitching software out of my life. :/