Key: saves time, avoids frustrations of standard KB – ReBoard Keyboard: Fonts+Themes Review

For newbies, thought I would share some quick-start tips that I put together for family and acquaintances about the new IOS alternate keyboard app 'Reboard'. Finally, there is a new alternate ios keyboard app that, for myself and what I do, is absolutely great. It actually saves me a good deal of time -- and frustration -- and it's free (or was when I installed it). This app, 'Reboard', works really well for me and is very helpful on my (slow) ipad, especially when my broadband/wifi slows down and causes erratic behavior (too much to explain on details of that problem). The app is new, so it still has some quirks and minor bugs, but they are working on improvements and new features. Support is very responsive. For anyone that decides to try it out, below are a few quick-start tips on the best time-saving features, and tips on how to best use them... ➤ The special characters/numbers above the alpha characters on the keys can be invoked by simply flicking up on the alpha key, no need to switch the keyboard to special character mode and back. Tip: tap the key firmly (you can even "hold" it for a split second) before flicking upwards, til you get used to it... ➤ Tap and hold the space bar, then moving finger left or right moves the cursor, without fail (without the sometimes uncertain behavior of doing same with finger in text). This feature will not move the cursor directly up or down between lines (it will "wrap" to a new line), but repositioning the cursor by tapping can be used for that. Granted, tap, hold, and move directly in text does same, tho not as well -- I got hooked on this, use it all the time... ➤ The delete backwards key when held in repeat mode, works at the same consistent, predictable speed (whereas the standard keyboard unpredictably goes into high speed chunk-at-a-time deletion mode after an uncertain number of characters are deleted). ➤ Swiping up on the delete backwards key deletes the entire preceding word, or character chain (such as a URL). Again, tap and hold the delete key slightly before flicking upwards til you get used to it. ➤ The app has numerous in-keyboard "actions", such as web search, dictionary lookup, gif search, image search, wikipedia search, etcetera, with the results returned in the keys area, which can be selected to be inserted into text being edited... With other keyboards, I frequently encounter a problem where the text insertion functionality stops working, and the only way I had found to restart it was to go into settings, keyboard, text relacement, select one (without changing anything), and then saving it. One: for some reason the problem occurs far less frequently with Reboard. And two: when it does, press and hold the action key (⌘) twice (turns typing suggestions off and back on) to "re-awaken" text replacement. A quirk of the above-noted typing suggestions is that text insertion replacement items also appear in the Reboard action bar, rather than in the actual document, so it is necessary to tap on them there to select them... Another quirk: the Reboard keyboard has the standard keyboard's top menu bar and all the way to the right on it is the icon to dismiss the keyboard -- but the icon is not there in some cases. Solution: flicking downward over the keys will also dismiss the keyboard. Also, switching keyboard apps back to Reboard can be awkwards. Uninstalling other alt keyboards, if feasible, makes it less so... Note that GIF's, images, and stickers selected via the action process are not insertable into some text apps. The app provides a "tips and tricks" section as well as a "how to use tour" -- warning, if viewing the how to use tour, alway tap on something else like 'settings' before exiting (otherwise, the tour continues in the actual keyboard). Apple hoards the voice to text functionality (from all alt keyboards), so it is necessary to switch to the standard keyboard for that. When I do, I can't wait to get back to the "smoothness" of Reboard... Lastly, the app was free when I installed it, but it does have a few in-app purchases, mostly 'themes' for differing color schemes, but some themes are free and I went with the green one for best visibility. And purchasing the Dropbox option only yields links to Dropbox items...
Review by Northbeacher on ReBoard Keyboard: Fonts+Themes.