I'd written about Swype here. While I was pretty excited back then, over time, it's something that I've come to both love and loathe.
In principle, it's a wonderful idea: it allows users of touch-enabled devices to just trace out the letters of the word they intend to use and Voila! The software works out the word you intend to use and puts it into whatever you are trying to enter text.  It makes it possible to quickly and without too much effort, type out whole sentences and paragraphs, ideal if you, like me, write long emails, blog and  write comments which run into paragraphs on Facebook posts, all using your mobile device! The undesirable side of it is that it often throws up words which you certainly had no intention of using. What makes it worse is that once you get used to Swyping, nothing else seems as much fun, and Swype is in general very accurate, but the times it goes wrong, it can go horribly wrong, as I've been finding out time and again, of late.

had posted a witty poem about spell-check horrors sometime back and Swype just takes it to the next level.  In spell-check, you are less prone to mistakes and if you are really confident of your spelling abilities, you can turn it entirely off.  With Swype, a boon turns into a bane in the time it takes for you to swipe your finger across the screen of your shiny touch device!
Just last night, I was chatting with Deepa and I saw that Swype had offered 'simmering' when I'd wanted to say 'something'. Since I'm so used to Swyping fast, the rather meaningless line went on to Deebah and I had to explain the gaffe.

I started explaining to Deebah all the cases of Swype-bloopers and even as I was attempting to do so, many more sprung forth and I kept adding them all on. The conversation went something like this:

Me: 'Something' becomes 'simmering' and many a time, 'post' becomes 'pussy', for God's sake!
Now, even as I swyped God, the default selection was 'good'.
Me: And 'God' almost always comes out as 'good'.
Now, Swype had given me 'add' when I wanted 'as'. It does it every single time and it's really irritating.
Me: And 'as' comes out as 'add'.
Simple sentence right? Wrong! 'comes' came out as 'chimes'.
Me: And when I typed 'comes', it came out as 'chimes'.
Me: And when it typed 'typed', it offered me 'touted'!!

Swype also routinely substitutes 'have' for 'gave', 'stud' for 'stuff'….I was telling another friend of mine about my woes with Swype and he recommended that I upgrade to the latest version. The new version has done nothing to ease my woes and has in fact become worse as the Swype guys have further shrunk the keypad to add another couple of function buttons. When the user is somebody like me who has short, stubby fingers, usability just goes right out of the window.
I've switched keyboards for now.