Openboard fork got rebranded into Heliboard

Samsy@lemmy.ml to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 142 points – Release HeliBoard 1.0-alpha1 · Helium314/HeliBoard
github.com

Since yesterday, the really cool fork of openboard with active development and support of adding a swype library manually, got rebranded into Heliboard. A release on izzyondroidrepo and fdroid should be coming soon.

PS. If you are using the old fork you have to remove it first and do a backup of your settings.

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How does it compare to floris board ?

Same question, floris board came the cloests to replacing non-FOSS keybaords for me.

The main reason I didn't switch yet was the lack of word suggestions / autocorrect. We rely on it so much

Other things that would be nice to have:

  • a more 'clicky' feeling on keypress, similar to Google Keyboard (not sure how hard that would be to implement)
  • support for inserting gifs, so that I don't have to use the sticker/gif menu in the apps themselves
  • Built in translations, maybe even done locally. It's really cool being able to type something in English, such as in a game, and having it send in another language. I've used it way more than I thought I would

You are tapping on a piece of glass. What is a "clicky feeling"? Vibration, or a popup?

The vibration pretty much

I just took a look at FlorisBoard again, and it looks like there are settings to change the vibration intensity and length. Setting it to the highest intensity and lowest length brought things very close.

A tiny difference I noticed that I could live without

  • google keyboard vibrates both when the key is pressed down, and when it is released
  • Floris only vibrates on keypress

For what it's worth, long press special characters on google keyboard dont vibrate on release, which I think is silly. It should always do that (maybe even having some lighter vibration feedback when a special character is used)

I found that the Pixel 7 pro finally got close to an iphone 8 in terms of realistic haptic vibrations. The 6a doesnt work with florisboards "define vibration yourself" though.

So in general useful haptic vibrations like on iphones where just never there. Not sure about other brands but all android phones I had had unrealistic vibrations.

I initially used FlorisBoard, but I changed to OpenBoard for the automatic corrections. As far as I know, FlorisBoard can only underline errors in red, then you have to tap the word and select which option it should be. On OpenBoard, a correction is made automatically, and it's quite accurate!

I actually prefere the way Floris Board handles word correction. I wish for a more complete and reliable way to word suggestion with an actual build-in dictionnary with definition, synonyms, collocation, antonymes... Would actually improve my English :/.

Auto-correction is cool and all, but IMO we shouldn't relie to much on that.

*Rely 🤣. It's true, but for me it's just much faster to have auto-correction, I usually know how words should be written, but I hit the wrong letter quite often, so that's why this works for me.

Has equivalent "clipboard & text manipulation" features but no real internal clipboard which is security critical.

I always prefer florisboard for the size control and typing, its just best. But HeliBoard is already way better than Openboard from my looks.

Why security critical?

Any foreground app can read the clipboard on Android. Androids clipboard only stores the last entry, so such clipboard histories in keyboard apps will be in the internal app storage. But as Openboard has no dedicated "copy only to internal clipboard" you have no protection really.