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TouchPal Demos Gesture Keyboard with Sliding Input for iOS 8

Wednesday June 11, 2014 10:17 am PDT by Eric Slivka

One of the major iOS 8 announcements at last week's Worldwide Developers Conference was support for systemwide third-party keyboards, and a number of prominent keyboard developers have announced their intention to support iOS. Fleksy was the first to share a photo of its keyboard running on iOS 8, and today TouchPal has posted a video of its keyboard in action.

TouchPal's video shows its keyboard supporting gesture/sliding input similar to Swype, as demoed in the stock Messages app on iOS 8. TouchPal also supports autocorrect and predictive word suggestions, although these are not shown in the demo.

While iOS 8's public release is still several months away, it's clear that keyboard developers, many of whom including Swype, Adaptxt and SwiftKey have honed their offerings on Android, are moving quickly to support iOS.

Several major keyboard developers have already been working with iOS, as seen with the SwiftKey Note app with Evernote integration and Fleksy's developer tools that allow developers to add support for the firm's predictive keyboard on an app-by-app basis. As a result, we expect quite a few third-party options ready for the iOS 8 launch.

Top Rated Comments

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Michaelgtrusa

62 months ago

IOS 8 is going to rock when it comes this fall.

Rating: 19 Votes

Limboistik

62 months ago

Honestly I feel like these swiping keyboards are more confusing than useful, or fast.

Personally I'd rather use the predictive ones.

Rating: 15 Votes

Daremo

62 months ago

I love this. It's finally opening up to developers, and great things will come of this.

Rating: 10 Votes

MikeyMike01

62 months ago

Nice of Apple to offer third party keyboards and I wonder what will happen next. Sandboxing hasn't won then fans.

Everything is still sandboxed. That's the beauty of it.

Rating: 9 Votes

MikeyMike01

62 months ago

Sandboxing never worked and never will. It was blown open from the beginning. Even running linux under a VM under OSX was blown open and as far as what I've read still is just one big security hole.

There's no point any more. Just open the whole thing up so we can have AT LEAST, AFTER A FEW YEARS what Android had years ago.

Security on anything internet connected does not work and never will.

You can keep the train wreck of infuriating pseudo-open nonsense Android has.

Rating: 8 Votes