Fleksy, the popular software keyboard for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, was updated earlier this week with a bunch of refinements and new features, including 3D Touch-based cursor control and Home screen shortcuts on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus.
Other goodies in Fleksy 7.5 include the all-new (and free) festive pack to dress up your keyboard in holiday-themed skins, the ability to search for emoji with the Highlights extension, a new GIF & Stickers tab for browsing animated GIFs and more.
3D Touch perks
Pressing Fleksy’s Home screen icon lightly brings up a contextual menu with the following shortcuts: Help & Feedback, Settings and GIFs & Sticker.
And if using Fleksy on the iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus, you can press firmly any key to turn the keyboard into a trackpad-like surface for precise cursor positioning, much like Apple’s implementation of 3D Touch cursor control on the stock keyboard.
On non-iPhone 6s devices, this feature can still be activated by long-pressing the Spacebar. The Cursor Control extension must be activated within Fleksy’s settings before 3D Touch can be used. To do so, launch Fleksy’s helper app, tap the Extensions tab and then hit the Cursor Control tile to activate the extension.
In addition to 3D Touch, Fleksy 7.5 includes an updated design for easier navigation and several other refinements and enhancements listed below.
Fleksy highlights
Here’s what’s new and fixed in Fleksy Keyboard 7.5:
New:
- Free Festive Holiday Theme Pack.
- New icon and updated app design for easier navigation.
- For 6s/6s+ devices Quick Actions have been added to the app icon.
- Activate Cursor Control with 3D touch. Press anywhere on the keyboard to activate it (make sure the Cursor Control extension is activated). For non-6s/6s+ devices, Cursor Control will still work by long pressing spacebar.
- Now you can also search for Emoji with the Highlights Extension. Scroll below Stickers & GIFs for Emoji.
- Added a GIFs & Stickers tab to the Fleksy app for searching, browsing and sharing content. You can still find GIFs and Stickers in the keyboard if you have the extension activated.
- Improvements to storing user dictionary in iCloud (your dictionary should be saved between updates and reinstalls).
- The Numbers Extension is now easier to use with VoiceOver
Fixed:
- Fixed side buttons not showing up in landscape mode on certain devices.
- [VoiceOver] Added names to icons in Hotkey Extension setup.
- Stability and performance improvements.
- Fixed some crashes.
In addition to free themes, other skins are available in Fleksy via the In-App Purchase mechanism.
Availability
Fleksy Keyboard requires an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad with iOS 8.0 or later and is localized in English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.