Openmoko keyboard mockup

Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) raster at rasterman.com
Tue Jan 6 11:23:41 CET 2009


On Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:02:40 +0100 Esben Stien <b0ef at esben-stien.name> babbled:

> Pascal d'Hermilly <pascal at tipisoft.dk> writes:
> 
> > a well working finger-friendly keyboard is the most critical missing
> > feature for me.
> 
> Yes, I find this issue very strange. First and foremost, it is us
> hackers that use this device for now and are supposed to make apps for
> freerunner and all, and we don't have a damn keyboard;). All this
> fancy pancy dictionary based guessing is maybe good for normal people
> writing crappy SMS messages, but not for the current user base, in my
> opinion.

you do - Terminal.kbd layout - it ships with illume. i designed the kbd engine
in illume to allow for straight-through pushing of key presses without a dict
int he way. the Terminal.kbd bypasses dict lookup by just emitting keysyms as
opposed to strings. don't like the keys on that .kbd? edit the .kbd file.
change it yourself! its just text! i tackled both sides of the problem in 1 bit
of code. if you want you can install and use the matchbox keyboard or the
matchbox numberpad keyboard too- they both work. they need a little extra
packaging with a .desktop file - but they are selectable. i tried to cover
pretty much everything anyone could want - an internal built-in kbd capable of
both dictionary fixup entry and simple straight-through terminal keyboard, able
to have that just disabled in favor of an external keyboard window provided by
any process, as well as protocols that are robust for hinting if you want
keyboard entry or not and what kind of entry (numeric, password, terminal) etc.
i've laid a lot of the groundwork and filled in a lot of the boxes too - can't
expect me to do EVERYTHING for EVERYONE... but i tried to cover a good
smattering.

-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler)    raster at rasterman.com





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