With a lot of open source projects being worked on largely out of passion rather than financial gain I feel like there must have been several times where a release caught people off guard and “came out of nowhere” with its impressive scale.

To give some examples of how this might happen maybe it was an initial release dropped to the public in a complete state that had been worked on for a while privately or a project that was dormant for an extended period of time and picked back up.

Can anyone here think of an example? It doesn’t necessarily need to be something groundbreaking maybe it got people excited in a very specific niche.

If you do have an answer I’d appreciate it if you could elaborate on it.

        • Dymonika@beehaw.org
          1·
          2 months ago

          Oops, I misread your comment; I didn’t realize that you were already seeking something superior to HeliBoard. What makes its autocorrect bad?

          • EveryMuffinIsNowEncryptedEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            Sorry, I may need to edit my original comment. I didn’t intend to imply that it’s bad. It’s not that great, but it’s not necessarily bad, to be fair. It’s just…meh. And honestly, I imagine that’s largely due to the fact that unlike the big name keyboard app makers, a lot of FOSS keyboards—Heliboard naturally being one of them—don’t track everything under the sun. Which is a good thing and something I like, make no mistake. The unfortunate downside of that is it’s also not quite as accurate, simply due to it not having as many data points.

            This is not something I blame it for, but at the same time I was hoping perhaps another keyboard might have a prediction system different enough to be slightly better. Then again, I’m no expert on keyboard prediction systems so I probably should’ve kept my mouth shut in the first place. So apologies for that. :/

            I feel autocorrect in general has gotten worse in the last decade or so. One problem I noticed, for example, that I’ve faced in other FOSS keyboards, not just in Heliboard, is that compared to ten years ago or so, there is a LOT more instances of autocorrect not catching absolute gibberish (like I get a couple letters off and it doesn’t catch it) or I’m one letter off of a very common word (like 1 key to the left or right) and it corrects it to something wildly different.

            Maybe I’m just misremembering (after all, human memory is hardly ever reliable), but I feel it was a LOT better around the Jellybean era (for Android).

            (Side note: this is all Android-specific; I have never owned any iOS device.)

            • Dymonika@beehaw.org
              2·
              2 months ago

              I have only ever briefly owned any iOS device myself, so hey, we’re in the right sub for such ownership! I guess I haven’t really noticed much of a difference. HeliBoard (the “B” is in fact capital, I recently learned) interestingly enough autocorrects to text expansions, which has good and bad use cases for me, since I’m really heavy on those. That’s interesting that FOSS models would worsen over time if you’re right…

              • EveryMuffinIsNowEncryptedEnglish
                2·
                2 months ago

                the “B” is in fact capital, I recently learned

                I didn’t quite realize that. Thank you for letting me know!