Finger friendly browse keyboard

William Kenworthy billk at iinet.net.au
Sun Mar 1 08:56:40 CET 2009


On Sat, 2009-02-28 at 18:49 +0100, "Bernd (Jesus McCloud) Prünster"
wrote:
> William Kenworthy schrieb:
> > I would rather the space - the other two keyboards are pretty
> > useless ...
> >
> > BillK
> >
> > On Sat, 2009-02-28 at 12:54 +0100, Pander wrote:
> >   
> >> John Sullivan wrote:
> >>     
> >>> Pander <pander at users.sourceforge.net> writes:
> >>>
> >>>       
> >>>> Hi all,
> >>>>
> >>>> Someone mentioned a finger friendly browse keoyboard, and I just could
> >>>> not resist making one myself. the result is here:
> >>>>   http://www.opkg.org/package_144.html
...

> >> Openmoko community mailing list
> >> community at lists.openmoko.org
> >> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
> >>     
> you CAN use the space and don't need the kbd switcher since you can 
> scroll upwards to switch the kbd.
> just edt the virtual kbd reloution (the relation between width an 
> height) and you can add another row of keys.
> one thing you have to keep in mind: the name of the kbd MUST NOT make it 
> appear firts in the list of kbds (e.g. rename the Default.kbd (or any 
> other kbd that has teh correct height/widht relation) to Alpha.kbd so 
> that it is firts in the list). if this is the case the illume kbd will 
> not be resized and the additional row of keys will be available without 
> occupying more of your precieous space. (i think this works because of 
> the same bug, that prevents the illume kbd from resizing of used in 
> landscape mode.
> 
> all credits go to Michal Brzozowski (god i hope i spelled it correctly)
> 

No, I mean remove both the other two keyboards so only terminal is left.
Then the word space and switcher are redundant and they both can be
removed saving space.  My fingers are too fat to use either of those
two, the dictionary is hopeless and they take forever to type a message
as you are always trying to fix the mistakes they make, stroking the
keyboard rarely works properly so you are continually trying to
select/delete or whatever and failing. As the default always pops up
first until you select terminal, its better to remove them altogether
(and they always pop up first when writing an sms for example) 

Others say it works, and I suppose it does for them, but to me its one
of the worst parts of the freerunner interface and the first bit I
disable by uninstalling numbers and default (or in the case of
shr-unstable, just coping terminal over the top of each).  Terminal has
its own problems/annoyances (the animation encourages miss-clicks and
takes up valuable cpu cycles - tried to find out how its done so it
could be minimised to just a quick blink to tell the key has registered
a press, but didnt find it - one day ... :)

These tiny key keyboards can only be used by normal people using a
stylus - what we really need for SMS is a large keyboard taking up much
of the screen and only a tiny window for text (160 chars) - in fact
thats what most other keyboardless phones seem to do, for good reasons.

BillK







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