What is new in ZetaTYPE Beta?

So ZetaTYPE is now live on the Android Market.

For those of you who have been involved with the alpha it may not look very different.  This is because most of what has changed is either under the hood or was experimental and has been removed for the production version.

We spent a huge amount of effort on testing and removing bugs.  We rewrote the code several times over and documented it extensively.  This has been time intensive but we believe that it will stand us in good stead when we need to make changes in future as well as being more reliable for you to use.

We added a major feature. We call is Error Correction.  The way this works is that Zeta constantly monitors your typing or sliding errors and if you have enabled Error Correction (in the settings menu for the keyboard) it will try to "learn" your habitual mistakes and compensate for them.  This all happens transparently in the background but should hopefully lead to lower error rates.

What is dissappointing are features that did not make it.  We have create a sophisticated analytics systems that allows us to get detailed information on usage of the keyboard.  At the 11th hour we removed it due to privacy and performance concerns.  This greatly simplified the code, made it execute much much faster and means that no special permissions are required.

Similarly we included and removed a sophisticated next word prediction system.  We still have high hopes for a system like this but we need to put much more effort in to testing it before we consider putting it in to production.  At the moment it is again too slow for our requirements and we have to think long and hard about what  a text prediction system would do to the dynamics of usage.

Please give us your feedback by joining our google group at http://groups.google.com/group/zetatype

We are looking forward to hearing from and learning from you :-)