This one kind of stumped me. The Fleksy keyboard app for iOS8 was brought to my attention at the most recent MacTechSA, I had to give it a second glance. I mean, why does one need a keyboard app and what’s wrong with the one I have on my iPhone/iPad? They say that it makes you type faster, corrects your typos as you go along (quite useful when accidentally signing off emails with ‘Kind retards’), and is generally easier to use. I find my existing keyboard fairly easy to use as it is, so I just don’t get it. It sounds pretty dumb to me.
So I had to try it out.
Damage
iOS: roughly about R11.
Android: R42,35 (free for 30 days)
What you need to know
- Available for Android and iPhone iOS8
- Available for iPhone and iPad on iOS8
- Boasts to be the fastest keyboard in the world
- Colourful themes
- Gestures make typing easier
- Resizeable keyboard
- Built-in Emoji keyboard
What we think you should know
This was my first attempt, thinking that this magic keyboard could translate my incredibly fast typing without a hitch. I was also trying to learn the shortcuts here without actually reading the tutorial.
I soon realised that it was not super-human and as soon as I learnt to speak its language, we got along a lot better. I took some time to go through the tutorial provided in the app (it was a few minutes, really) and things started to look a lot more word-like. With the use of swiping left, right, up, down and holding down on taps, things start to get a whole lot easier, faster and more accurate. It’s a few tricks to learn and then you’re A for Away.
So Rad:
- It is actually pretty fast and once you are used to the shortcuts, it’s difficult to go back to a normal keyboard again. I switched back to a normal keyboard after writing this article and then had to switch back to Fleksy to carry on doing the tricks I learnt.
- Built-in Emoji keyboard
- Sped-up deleting with just a swipe and hold movement is great
- You can teach it to forget words like “retards” so that you never sign off as “Kind retards” again.
Makes us sad:
- Not a lot of punctuation options in the punctuation a shortcut – you still need to flick to another keyboard for things like brackets
- It takes some getting used to
- It is a little too clever, in that it adds a space after each punctuation mark automatically, which is frustrating when trying to type email addresses (although it does tend to try and figure out when you’re typing an email address and make the @ and . available upfront, but it is not fool-proof).
- The ‘undo’ keyboard option is sorely missed. (E.g. The sped-up deleting is awesome until you speedily delete a whole extra sentence accidentally and can’t get it back)
