Thumb Keyboard 4.0 - Beta (upd. Beta closed)

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Update may 23: The beta is now closed. Thank you all for your participation and feedback. Please keep your suggestions coming. Suggestions and requests are welcome in the Thumb Keyboard thread in the paid-for app forum here on xda (link will follow)

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New beta 4:

• Customizable toolbar. The toolbar can be switch on or off with a simple toggle. For phones as well as for tablet (Gingerbread and Honeycomb have more functions to assign to the toolbar keys)
• New small keyboard for one handed operation on a 10" tablet. It also contains a "blind spot" which you can use to hold your tablet.

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Thrilled to announce a brand new version of Thumb Keyboard.
It's a total rebuild from scratch of the current market version, therefore I decided to launch it first as a public beta.

Besides a whole new core that is optimized for Gingerbread and Honeycomb, the new version (v. 4.0) introduces a whole lot of new features:

• multi-touch
• Correct previous written words with suggestions
• Shortcuts - store and edit much written phrases, mail signatures, logins and insert them with a simple tap
• New addition to the prediction algorithm: predict a word based on a previous word
• New: resize the width of the letter keys on the split layouts. With the option to adjust the height, one can now adjust the keyboard completely to ones own hands and device!!
• Alternative suggestions for voice input. Just tap on the recognized word to see the alternatives
• Redesign of the keyboard based on multi-touch chording. Entering numbers and operating the cursor keys was never more easy!
• New style popup keyboards. Fling, slide and wipe and back to typing again ..
• New design of the keyboard layout. Easier access of much used keys
• Better esthetic integration with Honeycomb by the use of Honeycomb style windows
• and more (and still more to come

The beta can be downloaded from thumb4beta.blogspot.com

(Because the beta was already out for some weeks for 10.1" tablets, some may wonder why this separate announcement. The reason is that the current version will support all screen sizes and layouts, just like the current market version. This means a lot more devices to be supported and a lot more test cases)

Looking forward to your feedback, suggestions, comments, bug reports (hope none ) etc.

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Update (May 3):
Version 4 beta 3.2: added Custom portrait/landscape layout combination * Smiley popup keyboards now on all layouts * new theme "digital red" * custom keyclick sounds * better dictionaries * 12 extra shorcut or quicktext slots * Return key in instant messaging apps * option to exclude contact database from predictions * some bug fixes

Awesome! Big fan of your work. We've talked via email about the keyboard. I still use it. Downloading now.

Originally Posted by halorin

Awesome! Big fan of your work. We've talked via email about the keyboard. I still use it. Downloading now.

Thought I've send you mail too. Let me know what you think about it.

Personally I think this is a BIG improvement over the version over the version on the Market. One of the things I liked about the stock GB keyboard was you could tap previously entered words and change what was entered. Love seeing that in here.

The only thing I don't see is being able to set different layouts for portrait and landscape. Being a phone user, I like that the hide keyboard button is hidden.

Big speed improvements as well. Great job!

Thanks going to give this a try!

Originally Posted by halorin

Personally I think this is a BIG improvement over the version over the version on the Market. One of the things I liked about the stock GB keyboard was you could tap previously entered words and change what was entered. Love seeing that in here.

The only thing I don't see is being able to set different layouts for portrait and landscape. Being a phone user, I like that the hide keyboard button is hidden.

Big speed improvements as well. Great job!

Thanks! The ability to set different layouts for landscape and portrait mode will certainly come back. It's one of the core functioneren of this keyboard. I left it out just to have something to do while the beta is tested :)

If you are on Gingerbread or Honeycomb you should try out the bigram predictions (only English supported right now). It will predict in many cases the next word with the previous word and just one letter. For example if you type "of" and then the letter t you get a bunch of relevant words starting with a t and that makes sense as the next word after "of". Great feature for phones. (It will also learn from word pairs that are entered a lot)

Originally Posted by appelflap

Thanks! The ability to set different layouts for landscape and portrait mode will certainly come back. It's one of the core functioneren of this keyboard. I left it out just to have something to do while the beta is tested :)

If you are on Gingerbread or Honeycomb you should try out the bigram predictions (only English supported right now). It will predict in many cases the next word with the previous word and just one letter. For example if you type "of" and then the letter t you get a bunch of relevant words starting with a t and that makes sense as the next word after "of". Great feature for phones. (It will also learn from word pairs that are entered a lot)

Awesome on both accounts! I use a Gingerbread ROM on my phone and have the bigram thing enabled. Liking this a lot.

Nice, I'm loving it so far, I've been waiting for something that actually *KNOWS* what you want type next and learns other than swiftkey. The only thing I ask you, is please give us the option to enlarge the spacebar by removing the smile faces, comma, and or period key.
Thank you, and how else besides the blog and this thread can I keep up with the latest beta releases?

Originally Posted by xdviper

Nice, I'm loving it so far, I've been waiting for something that actually *KNOWS* what you want type next and learns other than swiftkey. The only thing I ask you, is please give us the option to enlarge the spacebar by removing the smile faces, comma, and or period key.
Thank you, and how else besides the blog and this thread can I keep up with the latest beta releases?

Will look into that.

The beta releases are all published on http://thumb4beta.blogspot.com
You can subscribe to that blog to get a notification when a change is made.

I've had a lot of downloads and yet no single bug report. I like to think that the keyboard is completely bug free, but that would be wishful thinking in the context of this giant project.

Any bugs? Please report them here or on the beta site.