My experience with the Freerunner

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Wed, 28 May 2008 22:40:27 -0700 Matt Mets <matt.mets at cibomahto.com> babbled:

> > to correct - just backspace! :) (left slide). the magnifying thing is
> > possible
> > - but somehow i saw it as superfluous as chances are u press and release
> > very fast like a keypress on a normal keyboard and then notice the mistake.
> > even so
> > - the dictionary lookup will be correcting if it's in the dictionary and not
> > too far of a typo (press too far away from intended key). admittedly the
> > dictionary we ship has only 5000 words - but hey. it's a simple text
> > file. :) 
> Ok, keeping that in mind, pressing in the general area and using the 
> word lookup feature seems to work pretty well with a finger.  At least i 
> have been able to put in some simple phrases quite easily.

that's the main idea - that it is pretty usable even with fingers (within
touchscreen limitations - ie - don't press hard enough and it won't register a
press). it's meant to have a wide margin of error so it can correct your
mis-hits to be what you intended. as with all things - it's a guess. it's never
perfect, but humans definitely are not perfect (if we were we'd be able to hit
the touchscreen with pixel-level accuracy! :)).

> > horizontal is for quick selecting the most likely matches for correction
> > (or if no matches - exactly what you typed), and if it doesn't fit u can
> > access ALL matches from the popup list.
> >   
> One other thing I noticed was that the widget for the popup window 
> covers up the leftmost horizontal match or two, making it impossible to 
> select them.

i know. spotted that. fixed already in svn a few days back. :)

> > it's possible we can do this - in svn there is even a full qwerty kbd
> > layout i initially used - with ctrl, alt, etc. for terminal junkies, BUT
> > for now correction is always-on.
> >   
> Here is a funny idea: how about replacing the word lookup with 
> bash-style command completion when in the terminal?  That could be 
> really cool!  Maybe the word lookup feature already has an interface 
> that can be hooked into. I could see it being useful for auto-completing 
> really any application-specific data as well. :-D  For example, maybe in 
> the dialer program to show your closest contacts that match the number 
> (one of my favorite features of the GTK-dialer).

already considered. not now, but later, allow the application to hint things
like:


please use dictionary name: "en" (english) or "de" (german) or "shell" (a shell
dictionary that includes all the commands in $PATH and common options and so
on) and the layout can be different for "shell" mode (request a shell layout,
not the default or numeric" etc. etc. - but of course all to be done over time.
can't do everything on day 0. but have enough there so this can be expanded.
allow for custom dictionaries to be generated from other personal data (contact
lists etc.) and later even abstract out dictionary engines maybe to a dbus
service, abstract out keyboard ui handling to modules etc. etc. - so each
element of a keybard is its own abstracted unit that can be plugged-in. right
now its a big blob of stuff - but i do intend to abstract it and make the
barrier of entry to write just part of a keyboard (and not have to write the
whole thing if you don't want to) to b4e easy. move as much into config files
as possible and not require code (eg keyboard layouts are right now just text
config files - as are dictionary files along with frequency of use info).

i'm a big fan of making as much a config option as possible.

-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>