Colin's Journal

During testing of the latest version of ExpenseClam (released just last week), I stumbled across a small issue that I’ve not seen before.

Until recently I was using a back port of the Jelly Bean keyboard on my phone. I really like the swiping of characters implementation and find the auto correct to be rather good, although the prediction is rather limited.

Since SwiftKey released their version of character swiping (called SwiftKey Flow), I’ve been using it on my phone, and it’s generally good enough that I’ve not switched back to the Jelly Bean keyboard.

Now on to the issue: trailing spaces. Having swiped across letters to form a word, SwiftKey populates the word, and adds a space ready for entering the next word. Unfortunately this space isn’t just for show, it is populated in the widget value, so when the contents of the field are saved it includes the trailing space.

In general this is mostly harmless, however if you spot the trailing space and delete it, you can end up with two database records that look the same, but are actually different. This makes auto complete on fields less useful and potentially confusing.

The fix is easy enough, I just trim the string before saving to the database, but it would have been better if SwiftKey had used the same approach as Google and inserted the space at the start of a swipe rather than at the end.

Tags: Technology
Posted in Android | Comments Off on SwiftKey and trailing spaces