Text entry

[David Ormsbee]

> > http://dave.hereticmonkey.com/musings/phone_keyboard.html
>
> > Just my two cent idea.  Criticisms/improvements are certainly welcome.
>
> Did you thought about languages other then English?
> What about national chars?
> Switching languages during write?

Thanks for taking a look at it.  :-)

I haven't really considered other languages for the simple reason that
I know very little about them.  The only other language I use is
Korean, and that's so totally different from English that the entire
layout has to be rethought for it.

I just looked up the Polish alphabet and it looks like Latin + some
diatrics.  At a glance, I could make it so that this keyboard layout
could accomodate the diatric symbols (maybe give a different diatric
for whichever way you slide your finger off the key).  But I don't
know anything about letter frequency, when capitalization occurs, what
letter combinations are most common, etc.  I don't even think I've got
it nailed down for English yet.

I'm guessing that making a Polish keyboard that doesn't suck will
require someone who's proficient in Polish.  Switching to a Polish
keyboard layout (or any other layout) would be done either with
hardware keys, or an onscreen button...

Which actually brings up a question of mine.  I did a fair amount of
programming for the Palm OS, but almost nothing beyond trivial
examples for GTK.  Is there some common framework/API that OpenMoko
will be using to accomodate various text input modes?

Sincerely,
Dave