literal VS FlorisBoard

Literal (version 1.1.31-foss): Capture annotations, sources, and knowledge from text that you read.

I've recently come across Literal which makes me share notes or annotations which I want to save for later. It has tag functions too. Maybe this can help.

There's been some good writing on the general failure of "Hypertext books" (e.g. the first couple of paragraphs here [0]). I personally think this stems from some of the reasons that underlie some of those that you outline - books published on the web simultaneously try to be skeuomorphic in retaining the physical book metaphor (organized linearly, mostly static and plain text, etc), while still losing some of the real-world effects of the physical medium (being able to intuitively understand progress, markup, etc). The way that we publish and read text actually hasn't changed much, even though the target medium has of course changed dramatically, and as a result you end up with arguably the worst of both worlds. E-readers try to side step the problem by extending the book metaphor even further, but text on the web doesn't have that privilege.

I'm working on a product, Literal [1], that aims to solve some of your specific problems, specifically providing for a way to annotate and add notes to web content and enabling some degree of source management. My ambition is to move on to solve some of the other problems you raise as well. If you have an Android device and are interested in trying it out, I'd love to connect!

[0] https://subpixel.space/entries/open-transclude/

[1] https://literal.io/

Along these lines, I'm building an annotation management system, Literal, that fulfills some of your asks, specifically around collecting and annotating articles. It also does source management, and has a tagging system that would let you set up "to read" and "have read" lists. It doesn't yet do audio annotation but that's definitely on my list of things to add. It's Android only at the moment but I'd love to connect with you (or anyone else) that is interested in trying it out.

Thanks! I created an issue to track your idea of making tags more visually distinctive. The app right now is very weighted towards information capture, and I'm actively working on improving organization functionality so I think this idea goes right in with that theme.

Open source (github) and natively implements the W3C Web Annotation Data Model, meaning your data is safe and portable.

I didn't last long with the stock keyboard before installing AnySoftKeyboard which is one of the few FOSS alternative with support for swipe typing. The experience was... OK. It felt slow and it's accuracy left a lot to be desired. I still had to be slow and pretty accurate, so it didn't really feel like much of a change from the stock experience. FlorisBoard have also introduced their own implementation but the feedback I read suggested it would be much the same as my experience with AnySoftKeyboard's gesture typing.

Keyboard → OpenBoard (OpenBoard Upadted Fork, FlorisBoard when the v4 will be released...)

You could try https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard, available on F-droid.

I am excited to see how this project will develop. I'm sure starting out with https://florisboard.org/ was extremely helpful. Other devs have started from scratch, but florisboard is already advanced and feature rich. You could keep it open source to alleviate concerns of privacy. Just an idea.

The Github code repository (https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard) had an update on February 24, so the app is not abandoned. It reads like they plan a massive update for the next version, and word suggestions will be available.

I tested two: AnySoftKeyboard, it's stable and works even on very old devices, but it lacks modern features and the settings are really ugly and confusing (but once you look at all of them, you'll be able to make the keyboard the way you like it, is very customizable). And I also tested FlorisBoard, it's modern, beautiful, but it's a work in progress currently in early-beta stage and it has many incomplete or buggy features. So I ended up with AnySoftKeyboard. I know there are others, but it was these two projects that caught my attention the most.

Probably only via AOSP mirror. It's an AOSP component so not officially available as its own component. Check out https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard for a GitHub based OSS keyboard.

FlorisBoard (perhaps): This one is the dark horse for me. It's layout etc can be all customized to my liking and it's FOSS. But it doesn't have a suggestion provider API etc none of that yet (WIP) so, as it stands now it's "just" a highly customizable FOSS "keyboard" app, and nothing more. I have high hopes for it though.