A new version of SwiftKey X has been released to private beta testers, and it brings quite a few improvements. Chief among them: the ability to learn from your blog via RSS - certainly a nifty feature. Other highlights include better error reporting, general performance improvements, and a number of bug fixes. The update also brings a new novelty feature in the form of the "My typing heatmap," which keeps track of keystrokes and displays a "heatmap" of the keyboard.

What's new in this version?
New features:

  • Autocaps toggle - now choose whether your sentences begin with a capital letter or not
  • Better personalization - SwiftKey can now learn your typing style from your blog
  • Language switching - easy transitions between (e.g.) English and Russian keyboards, just slide the spacebar
  • More stats about how you type with SwiftKey - and more links to share them
  • My typing heatmap - cool visualization shows how you use your keyboard

Improvements:

  • Alternative character selection - now select with a slide rather than a new tap (this works for smileys too)
  • Instant language updates - refresh your language list to see new languages and new updates as soon as they are ready
  • Various layout and user interface usability improvements.
  • Better error reporting.
  • General performance and memory usage improvements.

Bug Fixes:

  • Various crashes and forced closes.
  • Various hard keyboard issues.
  • Incorrect cursor behaviour.
  • Various layout bugs on different screen sizes.
  • Various performance issues.
  • Various hard keyboard issues.

Not a bad update, although Artem is having trouble with the blog learning feature (by "trouble" I mean it won't work). The new version also apparently doesn't fix the "lost keys" issue for fast typists, where the keyboard just can't keep up and misses keystrokes entirely. Happily, the SwiftKey team is aware of the issue and hard at work on a fix.

For now, the update is private beta and limited to SwiftKey VIPs. It shouldn't take long for the improvements to trickle down once the kinks are worked out, though.