No Look Keyboard — Type Without Looking#

No Look Keyboard is an Android keyboard I built and shipped on Google Play back in 2012. It started from a simple frustration: “Texting on a shaky bus made me motion-sick — what if you could type using only the feel of your finger, without looking at the screen?”

Instead of tapping tiny keys precisely, you pick letters with big directional gestures (rubbing). Press and hold the input pad, rub toward one of eight directions to select the first letter of that direction’s character set, and rub back the other way without lifting to move to the next letter in the set. A plain tap (press and release) — without rubbing — switches the keyboard type (Hangul → numbers → symbols → Latin).

It never caught on (“too hard to grasp without a tutorial”), and the cost of keeping up with Android updates eventually led me to pull it from the store. Still, the idea was distinctive enough that I revived its input method and the original Hangul composition engine as a web widget. (The background and a retrospective live in the No Look Keyboard archive post.)

How to use — ① Press the pad and rub toward one of 8 directions. ② Rub back without lifting for the next letter. ③ Tap (no rubbing) to switch keyboards. ④ The arrows in each set are ⇧Shift · ⏎Enter · ⌫Backspace · ␣Space.