New look

[Batmancpu]

Can we get a frosted glass or liquid glass, kind of look on the classic and the keyboard application because that makes the feel more like a built-in application?. maybe you can try and use the frostkeys application, which is a fork of Hell board instead of floris board.?

[DevEmperor]

Good idea — I have gone through what it would take and opened
#378 for it, so the progress is tracked in one
place from here on.

The short version of what is in there: a frosted keyboard is three things, not one. The blur itself can
only come from the platform (Android 12 and up, Window.setBackgroundBlurRadius) because a keyboard cannot
read the app underneath it. On top of that it needs a theme translucent enough for the blur to show
through, which Snygg can already express but none of the bundled themes does — so this will come with a
"Dictate Frosted" day/night theme rather than as a switch that changes the theme you already picked. And
the key popups, the floating dictation bubble and the settings app are each their own surface with their
own mechanism. The issue also notes the parts that will decide whether this ships well: the blur is off on
devices that do not support it and in battery saver, it costs GPU work on a window that redraws on every
keypress, and a translucent keyboard has to stay readable over a white page as well as over a photo.

On FrostKeys: it is a nice piece of work and I am glad it exists, but changing the base is not on the
table. HeliBoard is GPL-3.0 and FrostKeys inherits that, while Dictate is Apache-2.0 on top of FlorisBoard
— and the app is not only a keyboard, so the dictation stack, the provider layer, the theme engine, the
resizable and floating window system and glide typing would all have to be rebuilt on a base that has none
of them. The effect itself is a plain platform API though, so we can build our own without touching their
code.

One scope note: this is about frosted glass. "Liquid glass" in the iOS 26 sense — refraction, specular
highlights, a surface that bends what is under it — is a much bigger piece of work and is not part of it.