Keyman 16.0 now available!

We are pleased to announce that we have now released Keyman 16.0!

You can download Keyman 16.0 on the Keyman downloads website.

In version 16.0, we have a few new features, but our focus has been on stability improvements and laying the groundwork for some functionality coming in version 17.0: improved gesture support on touch layouts, and LDML keyboard support.

Please note that while Keyman Developer 16.0 now supports designing flick and multi-tap gestures for touch layouts, these new gestures are not supported in Keyman 16.0.

The most significant stability improvements are:

• Keyman for Linux: significantly improved compatibility with applications (#7079)
• Keyman for macOS: improved management of security configuration (#7354)
• KeymanWeb: improved text field edit support for mobile devices (#7343)

We’ve made many additional bug fixes and improvements (see the version history), and are highlighting just a few of them here.

New Localizations:

• Czech
• Dutch
• Kannada
• Russian
• Swedish
• Ukrainian

More new features and changes

Keyman for Windows

• Minimum supported version of Windows is 10.0
• Revamped Keyman Configuration (#7206)

Keyman for macOS

• Minimum supported version of macOS is 10.10 Yosemite.
• Improved management of security configuration (#7354)
• Caps Lock now works the same as on Windows and Linux (#7795)

Keyman for iPhone and iPad

• Minimum supported version of iOS is 12.1
• Fix recognition of iPad as tablet device for styling (#7563)

Keyman for Android

• Minimum supported version of Android is 5.0 (Chrome 37.0)

Keyman for Linux

• Improved reordering and backspace behavior in Chrome(ium) and other apps that don’t support surrounding text (#7079)
  • Note, this currently requires an update to ibus to be installed, pending upstream merge and distribution of ibus patches #2440 and 781119be
• System tray will now show icon defined in keyboard instead of generic Keyman icon (#7678)
• km-package-install now supports optional --bcp47/-l parameter that allows specification of language (#7731)
• Keyman 16 will be the last release that supports Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic.

KeymanWeb

• KeymanWeb no longer uses an “aliased element” to support touch-based input on mobile devices. KeymanWeb now uses the inputmode='none' functionality supported in recent browsers, which supports text selection, improved presentation, improved scrolling and better compatibility with websites and speech input. This change means the minimum browser version for KeymanWeb has been incremented (#7343)
• Minimum supported version of iOS is 13.0 (up from 9.0) – all browsers
• Minimum supported version of Chrome for Android is 66.0 (up from 35.0)
• Minimum supported version of Firefox for Android is 79.0
• Minimum supported version of Opera for Android is 47.0
• Android Browser (Android 4.x) is no longer supported

Keyman Developer

• Redesigned Touch Layout Editor and introduced support for Flicks and Multitap (#6884)
  • Note: these gestures will be supported for use in Keyman 17.0
• Introduced support for Hints to the Touch Layout Editor (#6936)
  • Note: hints will be supported for use in Keyman 17.0
• It is now possible to set the “languageUsesCasing” flag from the Model Editor UI (#7008)
• We have added the ability to provide extensions and customizations to the Unicode-spec based wordbreaker for lexical models (#7279)
• We have added a fix for directional quotes not being treated as apostrophes by default for lexical models (‘, ’ vs ') (#7767)
  • Note: lexical models must be recompiled with Developer 16.0 to receive the fix.