Fleksy- GIF, Web & Yelp Search

Hi. I would normally send this sort of message directly to the fleksy support team, but I am hoping that others can benefit from my comment and any response to it from fleksy. As a blind Ipod Touch user who also has cerebral palsy, fleksy has been a lifesaver for me since the day it was released over a year ago. It allows me to quickly type notes, texts, tweets, etc.; some of the notes are very long. Like many other posters, I was disappointed to launch fleksy today and find a message that new updates were available, with the only option to go to the app store. I was taken to the app store, where I was pleased to find the newest version of fleksy. Unfortunately for me, the update says it is only compatible with devices running IOS 7 or newer. I have an Ipod Touch 4g running 6.1.5, but I clicked the update fleksy button anyhow. The app store promptly alerted me that my device is not compatible with this version of fleksy and allowed me to download the last compatible version. Unfortunately, I am no longer able to use fleksy, because I still get the alert that there are new updates in the app store upon launching fleksy, then I am taken to the fleksy page of the app store. This makes me very sad as fleksy was a huge part of my daily ipod use. It may mean that I have to shell out for a new ipod touch 5g when I have a perfectly functional ipod touch 4g right here. I hope, however, that the fleksy team will be able to release an update to fleksy that will make it useable on older devices that are not compatible with IOS 7. As I know the fleksy team monitors this forum and usually responds promptly to user feedback, I look forward to reading your response and to a solution that will enable me to use fleksy again in the near future.

If you normally sync your iPod with iTunes or have backed your apps up there, it's possible to solve your issue. Check your recycle bin for the app. If it's not there, look in iTunes itself under the apps section to see if it's in the list of apps. If you find it either way, you're golden. Here's how to fix it. If the app is in your recycle bin, right click or press your applications key to bring up a menu, and restore the file to its original location. Look in iTunes under the app section to make sure you see the app in the list. Delete the app on your iPod. Now sync your iPod with iTunes, and the app will return. It will be usable this way. Just don't try to update it in the future. (smile) I hope this helps. If you need better instructions, I'm Plumlipstick on Twitter and would be happy to help you get this sorted. Good luck.

I'm on iOS 6 with an iPod Touch 4. I am stuck in the update loop. This is a real drag. I'm not in the market for a new iPod, and at the moment no longer have the use of this app. I hope this too can be fixed.

Hi everyone, Now that our update of Fleksy has hit all servers worldwide, it is time to reflect on a couple of points that have been raised. Firstly - we have to apologize for the issues we had with the expiry of the previous build. This was a critical bug which caught us by surprise. We always thoroughly test every Fleksy update we issue, both in house and with a professional external QA company. Admittedly as this was a "time bomb" type bug, it was not identified in our testing. We are doing a thorough review of our testing and building processes on Monday to ensure this type of thing does not happen again, and would like to apologize for the inconvenience we caused you. We also apologize if a couple of minor issues exist in the current update due to the fact we wanted to get it out there as quickly as possible to get your Fleksy working again. We'll fix glitches in future updates, as we always do. Onto this new version, which some might notice is our 2.0 release of Fleksy. In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and suggestions from users for how to make Fleksy more useful. By far, the most popular suggestion is integrating Fleksy in other apps. We have focussed our business on this, while taking pride in providing an app that is both accessible, and universal. It's not an easy challenge. Since iOS was introduced, no keyboard company has managed to integrate on the platform - and keyboard customizations (or the lack of them) has become something of battlefield in the entire mobile platform arena. In this context, we have taken on the seemingly impossible task of being the first to do it. We are not a huge company, yet we are trying to do what companies much bigger than ours have tried and failed. But we are confident the effort is worth it. And reading the reviews from outside the English speaking world, we have thousands of people who would love the Fleksy experience in their native language. We are trying, again with a small team, to scale our technology and rapidly expand our reach. This work affects both our iOS and Android products, and we are excited to have a global view of the opportunities our technology can bring. Doing such ambitious things leads us to some interesting compromises. For example - in the old Fleksy v 1.0 application, symbols were entered by hovering to an area which is higher than the typical keyboard layout. This can't happen in other apps - other apps often have buttons and other user interface elements right above the keyboard, so we can't take more space than the standard Apple keyboard does. This is only one, tiny example of the types of things we have to carefully rethink as we want Fleksy to become more of a standard than a standalone app (and it's also one you noticed). Where we reach such compromises, we do our best to test solutions both internally, and externally including engaging with the visually impaired and AppleVis community. For sure, every change takes getting used to, especially for power users. But we try to keep everything intuitive, and to measure that it doesn't make your typing slower or less accurate once you are used to it. And, as we work on Fleksy integrations, we are also finding opportunities to improve the experience in ways that aren't even possible when we work in our own, standalone app. One of these decisions we had to make was whether we support iOS 6 or not going forward. The new iOS 7 provides some tools that are incredibly useful for integrations going forward. To put it in reverse, it would be very hard to support a lot of features, especially in the accessibility list, in a third party app integration in iOS 6. iOS 6 users are currently 5% or less of our active user base, and getting fewer by the day. This has been a much faster adoption rate than we saw from iOS 5 to iOS 6, and we were encouraged to focus our full effort to expanding Fleksy in some more languages as a more effective way to impact the biggest number of people's daily lives. We are sorry if this affects you - we will try to see if there is something we can do for those users who still rely on iOS 6 and Fleksy, especially in the accessibility community. We had hoped to spend a lot of time to explain all this to people before updating the app, but the critical bug of last week forced us to focus on getting Fleksy working again first and foremost. We are thankful we managed to get the issue sorted relatively quickly despite the holiday weekend. And thankful for the forum to come and explain these design decisions here. As always, we welcome all feedback and thank you for being part of our journey. Ioannis Fleksy team

Thank you Fleksy team for your explaination on this. Most importantly, thank you for getting out a working version to us quickly. also, thank you for reminding me that no peace of software is perfect and bugs will most likely be present. especially when an update needs to be released as soon as possible.

Hi Monica: Are you suggesting that I install the version prior to the most recent compatible one with IOS 6. I don't think that will be possible, as itunes and all my backups of the itunes app folders have the most recent IOS6 compatible version of fleksy (the infinite loop one). I regularly run CCleaner, which dumps older versions of apps from my recycle bin. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

I'm noticing that when I try typing a word manually, Fleksy frequently won't read the characters my finger is swiping over. Also in the settings, there is an option to set the keyboard orientation. By default it is set to auto. I've set my phone to be locked in portrait mode so does this setting have any effect if I do change it?

Hi to the Fleksy team if you are reading this post. I am just wondering will there ever be say one final working version of Fleksy for ios6 users? You see, I have a specific reason for not updating to ios7 because of the reduce quality of the compact Daniel voice and it may impact on my hearing impairment if I do so. I know that if I update to ios7 there is no going back. I hope you can understand and appreciate my concern about my hearing impairment and of course, I use Voiceover too not forgetting that. Fleksy is my productivity app that I can't do with out on my iphone. I use it for lituarly anything to do with writing and pasting into other apps where the app requires it. So I hope you will consider or at least let us know that if at all possible you'll release say a final working version for those who are still using ios6 for own personal reasons. I would happily sacrifice the new features for a working version. I would of updated to ios7 a long time ago but what with the degraded quality of the uk compact Daniel voice this made me not do so as its the only voice I can proaply understand and I have tried all the other english voices and none of them will work for me. Looks like I'll be hanging out on ios6 until ios8 comes along. lol Seriously, I wanted to update at the time but as I relies with ios7 technology works only if it serves its purpose and meets the required needs of the individual whatever disability they have. Look forward to hearing from you guys and hopefully I can become a happy typer again on ios6

Hey Everyone, Just wanted to let you know we have some promising leads on how to restore functionality for iOS 6 devices. We are working on it and should our work be fruitful, plan to submit an update as soon as possible. Thank you for expressing your commitment to Fleksy and thank you for reaching out to us with your honest feedback. We are equally committed to supporting Fleksy for as many users as possible. We will keep updating this thread as we make progress. - Bill on behalf of the Fleksy team

Hi all, so I have finally done it updated to ios7 last night. I had to send a text to a friend and well guess I couldn't stand typing on the normal iOS keyboard. So my experience with the compact voice while yeah he has become more muffled and the like. I have found that I keep going back to him anyway. Haven't really an interest in the hq voices. So while Daniel is not as good as in ios6 he is still what I would call "intelligible" to me. Certainly room for improvements on that voice should that ever become a reality and hopefully in the form of a software update. So thats my story. Do I regret updating to ios7? As most people may probably think for me it was one of those cases where I updated and the experience afterwards was that I didn't hate the update but grew to like it the more I used it. The only gripe is the compact voice but i guess I can live with that. To end on a positive note, my favourite feature of ios7 which interestingly I haven't seen talked about much either because I don't know if its a feature where its worth mentioning or people may over look it is the ability to turn off the Voiceover sounds. For some reason they all ways got on my nerves in ios6. I'm the sort of person who juste wants to hear the information and don't need the extra sounds to let me know that I'm entering a new area of the screen. Anyway, bringing this back to Fleksy. I am glad that the team are working on an update for those who still require ios6 for whatever reasons they may be. Guess I couldn't wait any longer. lol

The return of iOS 6 support is great news. Thank you for your concern, consideration, and commitment.

I was trying to input a smiley character but Fleksy is typing full stop instead of the ':' character and it's also doing that when I try inputting ';'. It seems to be doing that with a few other characters also. Has anyone else experienced this behaviour?

I'm also having another bug where when you first open Fleksy and nothing has been typed, it doesn't always put the first letter in capital. It can be easily edited, but just thought I'd report it. Apart from these small bugs it is a great update.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Apart from the pending iOS 6 issues, improving manual input is also in our pipeline, as well as increasing all around app stability. Saqib, I am sorry you have been having trouble. We will extend our efforts to reproduce and eliminate this issue. Some questions to help us find it faster: Have you experienced the problem when attempting to text a recipient from the Messages option, rather than the Favorites? Any issues with the Email, Twitter of Facebook options? Are you typing in Portrait or Landscape? Any orientation locks in place? Thank you and thank you for your patience and understanding. Regards, Bill

I concur with Saqib's comments above. I have had the exact same problems; messages are never sent whenever I try using any of the menu options. To answer Bill's questions, it doesn't really make a difference either way. Using the Message option or the Favorites option, the result is the same. After Selecting either of these options, the app freezes. When it begins working again and you try and hit send, the messages just never get sent, even though you are returned to the main Fleksy keyboard screen. Of course, the text that was typed, is lost too. Very frustrating. I am using/typing in portrait, and my phone' screen lock orientation is set to portrait locked. I am using the app on an iPhone 4S, running iOS 7.0.4.

Hi everyone, using the latest version of Fleksy running an iPhone 5 with IOS7.0.4 I am noticing the following. Basically, in ios6 I was able to use the raise to speak feature with my hand to review what I have written. Now as of the latest versions of the above app and operating system I am no longer able to do this. It will work once maybe twice but rarely does it go above two times. What happens is that I put my hand just above the speaker grill and nothing happens. I have to issue the swipe up with two fingers to show the menu command and then Voiceover will read aloud what I have typed. Just wanted to report this and to see if I'm the only one having this strange bug. Apart from this though am happy with the latest update. Although, I wish there were more choices to choose from it seems to be that you have to be a bit more accurate now to get your desired word. Oh well. I'm sure this will be address in time but just wanted to report that raise to speak bug out there. Thanks Daniel

As sockhopsinger has already said, the latest release of Fleksy is unusable with VoiceOver. I’ve updated the app’s entry accordingly. So, if you haven’t already done so, you should now make the switch to Fleksy VO, the recently released edition of Fleksy specifically for VoiceOver users.

Sadly I agree with you. I paid gladly to help a new project that was growing, and now blind and sighted are again separated. Yes, the app layout is the same, tapping and writing much faster than before. It was presented as a way of aproaching blindness to sightness, in terms of writing, but now there are two different apps. I honestly don't want a refund, I want equality.

Hi there, I think it's about time we go on record and respond to the Accessibility community about Fleksy VO, the Fleksy Keyboard app, our SDK, and all the concerns we have been receiving about our commitment for accessibility. Rather than writing another, more extensive blog post, we think it is better to go on record and answer your questions directly. We are arranging an interview with Jonathan Mosen, and are encouraging all participants of this forum to send him questions for us via the form at mosen.org. We have asked for a challenging interview, and we hope it will help explain a lot of things to the accessibility community, which we have sadly upset. Please watch this forum for details of when this will air, and send Mr Mosen your questions for me. Thanks Ioannis Founder and COO @fleksy