Ring
Ring is a keyboard on demand. Select a field and a faint ring button appears by your thumb. Tap it and a compact circular keyboard opens there. Swipe through the letters of a word, or tap single keys.
Select either field, then tap the faint ring button that appears near your thumb. Swipe a word such as “lease” or “tenant”. The ring works on every field marked for it in this app, including Ask.
Anatomy
When to use
- Short replies and search on phones, where one thumb does the typing.
- Fields where swiping common words is faster than tapping.
- Not for passwords, codes or anything that needs exact characters. Leave the system keyboard there.
Behaviour
| Moment | What happens |
|---|---|
| Select a field | A faint ring button appears where your thumb last touched. |
| Tap the button | The keyboard opens there; the system keyboard goes down; the field stays selected. |
| Swipe | Your stroke is decoded into a word. Three suggestions sit above the ring; tap one to swap. |
| Tap | Single keys type as usual, with completions for the word in progress. |
| Backspace after a swipe | Removes the whole swiped word. |
| Select anything else | The ring and its button go away. |
How swiping works
The stroke and every word’s ideal path through the key centres are resampled to 24 points. Each word is scored by position (where the stroke went) and by shape (how it turned), plus a small prior for common words. Words whose first or last letters are far from the stroke’s ends are skipped, so decoding stays fast on a phone.
Best practices
- Summon, never force. The ring is an option on top of the system keyboard.
- Keep the field in sight: the ring sits below the field, scrolls the page like a system keyboard, or sits above it.
- Return moves to the next ring field in the same form, or submits the form from its last field.
Accessibility
- The ring is pointer-only by design. Keyboard and screen-reader users type as usual; the ring never takes a field away from them.
- Hiding the ring hands the field back to the system keyboard.
- Settings can turn the ring off for the whole app.
Specifications
- Diameter
- 224 to 272 px, fitted to the screen
- Ring button
- 48 px, 60% opacity until touched
- Tap vs swipe
- Strokes shorter than 8% of the radius are taps
- Suggestions
- Three, best in the middle
- Ink trail
- The person’s stroke in ink, fading over 500 ms