How useful is zhuyin / 'bopomofo'? How to use it?

[imron]

3 hours ago, AdamD said:

although I'm hesitating on the AU$8 price.

Rather than comparing the price to other apps on your phone (which are almost all in a race to the bottom on pricing) have a think about the sort of things that you'd regularly pay ~AUD$8 for.  Maybe lunch and a drink, or coffee and a cake at a cafe somewhere.  Compare the value of those things with the value you might get from the app and if you think you might get the same or greater value from the app then consider getting it.  If not then continue to give it a pass.

[DavyJonesLocker]

5 hours ago, imron said:

Rather than comparing the price to other apps on your phone (which are almost all in a race to the bottom on pricing) have a think about the sort of things that you'd regularly pay ~AUD$8 for.  Maybe lunch and a drink, or coffee and a cake at a cafe somewhere.

 

100% agree, there still is a mentality of "not willing to pay" or go for cheapest for apps or e-type material like books etc. 

 

I was reluctant to buy Mandarin Companion series at 50kuai  book or so.  However I realised that the starbucks coffee and cake I was consuming while considering the purchase was about 60.  I buy that every day! PLECO seemed initially expensive but given I use it almost daily several times a day it seem very reasonable priced. 

[AdamD]

5 hours ago, imron said:

think about the sort of things that you'd regularly pay ~AUD$8 for.

 

It's not that AU$8 is an astonishing rip-off (it's not), it's that my phone is already full of apps I paid for and used once. The built-in 注音 keyboard is more than decent, and working with third party keyboards in iOS is still not great.

[imron]

There's your answer then, it fails the value proposition so continue to give it a pass.

 

5 hours ago, AdamD said:

and working with third party keyboards in iOS is still not great.

Tell me about it!  Apple doesn't make it easy for third party keyboard developers. I've mostly finished an iOS version of Pīnyīnput (to the point where I'm starting to consider pricing), and there are a number enforced limitations that ensure third party keyboards will be inferior to built in ones.

[AdamD]

I stopped using them altogether because of memory/performance issues on my 6, and because switching away from them was cludgy. Unless they have really good English and emoji keyboards built in, going that way is more trouble than it’s worth.

 

Good luck with your own keyboard though! I hope it pays off for you.

[imron]

1 minute ago, AdamD said:

I hope it pays off for you.

Thanks, however I don't expect it will break even on development costs for a number of years.  Luckily there were some other benefits to developing it - namely using it to gain familiarity with the Swift programming language.

[AdamD]

Do Swift keyboards perform better than ObjectiveC keyboards? The memory demands alone made early iOS keyboards a nightmare.

[imron]

Nope.  It's more or less the same.

 

Pinyinput has pretty low memory demands (it doesn't do any sort of intelligent completion, so doesn't need a dictionary or statistical information), but even then, it can still take about 2 seconds to switch in to it on my phone (a 4s) if its not already in memory.  For comparison, if not in memory Swype takes about twice that, and iOS slides down the keyboard for the entire duration of a third-party keyboard switch, which can feel pretty jarring.

[AdamD]

Bizarre that it would slide down the keyboard. No wonder there are memory problems on older phones.

 

I bought 超注音 after all (AU$4.50, either it dropped or I misremembered). It’s good but most of the punctuation is tucked away, so I’m forever long-pressing to bring up second level keyboards. The English keyboard is pretty useless, but that’s not the main feature so eh

[imron]

56 minutes ago, AdamD said:

Bizarre that it would slide down the keyboard.

The alternative would be to have either the old (and now unresponsive while the new keyboard is loading) keyboard on screen, or to have a blank screen.  Neither of which is desirable either.

[ParkeNYU]

Yeah, I can't find the comma on the damned thing... I'll have to message him about that too. He already acknowledged that Hiragana 'wi' and 'we' were missing, despite being present in Katakana.

 

@imron I want to make my own iOS input method. Where do I start? I have the .cin file and that's about it.

[imron]

I'm not sure what a .cin file is, but the place to start is the Apple documentation for custom keyboard extensions.  There are various tutorials available on the web too if you search for ios custom keyboard extension, here's one of the top results.