Flipping The Board

There should be a measure of the bugginess of software. I mean, you could just count the number of problems a program has, but that would be misleading since some apps do more than some others. At the risk of driving people away with an esoteric example, I've done a lot of work with Eclipse, an application for software development. There's a lot of things I don't like about it, and I could spend all day listing the errors and poor design choices I've found. But even a hater like myself has to temper his criticism by acknowledging that Eclipse is a big and complicated piece of software that does many things, so it's inevitably going to have more bugs than your average Candy Crush ripoff app.

What I'm trying to get at is this: Flipboard for Android is the worst program ever written. It's the software equivalent of that "You Had One Job" meme. Flipboard's one job is to display news articles. There's no animation, no interaction, just text and the of photo. In other words, it's a web browser from 1994.

So what's wrong with it? Well, aside from downloading about as a web browser from 1994, there's also:

• The pages blank out randomly. Flipping them back and forth causes them to reappear for some reason. 
• It shows me the same article again and again. 
• It sometimes shows empty articles. 
• It occasionally decides to restart itself for no reason while I'm reading an article.

 So that does it; I'm looking for a new personalized news aggregator. I see there are lots of alternatives.  But I think I'll try Mosaic; I've heard good things about it.

1,400 Words You Can Never Say On Android

I'm a big fan of the swipe-typing keyboard on Android phones.  So I was interested when it came out a few months ago that the swipe recognizer has a long list of words it won't recognize. There are the usual suspects, like "dock" and "shoot" (at least, that's what comes out if you try sweeping them.) But there is also a curious collection of other words that are verboten. For instance, many times I've tried to type "geek", which comes out as "Greek" or "feel" regardless of how careful my typing. The list of banned words seems arbitrary, so I decided to investigate:

A lot of sex-related terms don't work, including "sex" itself, which becomes "sec" or "seed."  Here's what I got for a few others:

• Menstruation: menageries, menagerie
• Erection: Ervin
• Uterus: yetis, iri
• Yet it accepts "menopause" and "puberty." Or "udder" for that matter.

For the following words, it won't recognize the word automatically, but will offer it as one of the alternate possibilities the swiper can choose:

• Condom: condition
• Penis: permits, pennies
• Vagina: basins
• Testicle: twiddle, sickle
• Vulva: bulbs, villa

It won't recognize "gay", instead suggesting "gassy," "Gary," or "hay." Yet "lesbian" and "homosexual" are accepted.

Religious terms are just odd. Consider the branches of Islam:

• Sunni: Sino, sunk
• Shiite
• Sufi: studio

You'd think Shiite would be the one it would avoid. Lots of other religious terms worked, though: "Eucharist," "Hajj," "Imam," "Rabbi," "Kosher," "Halal."

How about Google's competitors?

• Samsung: Samsung
• Microsoft: Microsoft
• Lenovo: Kenobi

All in all it's quite silly.  I could understand if they have it biased so that when there's some doubt, it chooses the less embarrassing word.  And yet, I've lost count of the number of times it's interpreted "thing" as "thong."

The Electronic Slide

A new feature I've been using on my phone is trace typing. On the standard Android virtual keyboard, you don't have to hit each key individually, Blackberry-typing-style. Instead, you can just slide your finger/thumb over the keyboard to each of the letters in your word. It will infer from the path which word you meant. I don't know many devices this is available on; even if it has Android, a phone/tablet may have a proprietary keyboard, so it may not work for you. But you can still download Google's standard Android keyboard.

I've been critical of phone technology in the past, and recently of Google itself, but I have to admit, I'm amazed at how well this works. I've been using the slide technique to type this entire article so far, and although I've had to retype the odd word when my movements were a little careless, it's managed to recognize each word. In fact, it's very good at interpreting sloppy traces around the keyboard, even when my thumb careens wildly around resembling Tim Tebow's throwing motion. For instance, when I typed, "movements" I just sent my thumb back and forth across the board, only in the general direction of the needed keys, yet it somehow made sense my virtual scribble.

It's taken some getting used to. Twenty years of touch typing have left my brain with no conscious awareness of where the letters on a qwerty keyboard are. So I sometimes forget where I'm going half way through a word, and make a wrong turn. Yet it manages to figure out my intentions anyway a lot of the time. Okay, as I'm typing that, I had one of those lost moments, and turned "intentions" into "injunctions."

My point is, this is the opposite of so much artificially intelligent things that try to be helpful but misunderstands you even when you're trying to be clear. Finally here's A.I. tech that exceeds expectations.