It is old news, but I have recently, yes, only recently, got friendly with swype input, (as someone who has the word "technology" in his job title, the shame and dishonor such wilful neglect has brought upon my person is incalculable, but thanks to my new state of the art Android phone, I have the chance to turn this narrative of shame into a narrative of redemption, and nobody needs to commit hara kiri!  Oh, and in case you do not yet know what swype is, it is a word made up of swipe and type, it’s the input mode where your finger goes from B to E without stopping when typing the word, “because”.

 

I first came across the trace typing technology at annual CSUN Conference on disability in 2011, but respectfully ignored it, because I figured that there's nothing swype can do that typing with auto-correction and/or word-prediction can't do faster. Strictly speaking, I wasn't far off; for someone with minor motor skills impairment, I could swype no more accurately than I could type, and if I was to use a stop watch, I am sure, I can type as fast, if not faster, than swype. But it only took less than a month of switching from iPhone 4S to Android Jelly Bean to turn me into a believer, even to the extent of searching for a non-existent tablet-like flat keyboard for my Windows 7 based PC, as well as hating the QWERTY keyboards that have been my friend for the last 25 years. (oh, loyalty can be so fleeting).

 

Why do I adore swyping so much, if it's not the speed? Well, here is the short version,  dragging the finger all over a virtual keyboard uses less muscles than traditional keyboard, especially for someone accustomed to type with 2 fingers, And that's it, that's the reason I am willing to divorce my qwerty keyboards. And the quickest way Microsoft can convince me to purchase a Surface RT tablet is if it tells me that I can use it as a swyping keyboard for my desktop computer.

 

Right now, the arguably best third-party swype applications apart from the “trace typing” offered by google keyboard are Swype from Nuance based in Massachusetts and Swiftkey by TouchType ltd based in London, although all three keyboards are designed for Android platform, and the user experience for Swype and SwiftKey are almost identical, both make use of individualized Word-Prediction and analyzes user’s vocabulary patterns, and both have price tags of $3.99. So the choice really comes down to individual preference, personally, I chose Swype over SwiftKey because I needed the Asian Keyboards, and TouchType is still Beta testing theirs even though I have a soft spot for everything British.

Now, how does one uses trace typing on a Windows based Desktop PC? At the moment of composition and to the best of my knowledge, trace typing is not offered by Microsoft for Windows 7 or 8 based computers, nor can one purchase an integrated third party keyboard (physical or software) for this purpose, so the only way one can use Swype on Desktop PC is by using Chrome Remote Desktop, what is chrome remote desktop? It is an free add-on from google for the Chrome Browser that allows one to remotely operate window based computer via Android Smartphone, and the technology definitely is not new, If you remember PC anywhere from the late 1990s, such technology had always suffered from either insufficient processing power or Internet speed neither problem exist in 2014, since my smartphone has as much processing power as my desktop computer at home, the speed bug of the 90s is unlikely to be much of an issue today.


A potential problem with this technology, though, is that it threatens to turn the world into a hacker’s paradise and therefore, a nightmare for It professionals, even I have concerns about the security implications of the technology and I am not usually the paranoid type.

But at least we now know that it can be done and has been done, so the question for me now is how much of a security risk I am willing to take to use trace typing on my PC…

 

 

 

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