Raster's Image and chatting on the moko!

Wed Aug 20 02:21:12 CEST 2008

On Tue, 19 Aug 2008 22:42:58 +0200 David Samblas
<dsamblasomcommunity at gmail.com> babbled:

i will say- i didn't touch qtopia. so any gsm registering or not.. is not my
doing :)

but... that keyboard is the one i have cunningly worked on. it should
address most things people have bitched about and want. it is NOT perfect. i
don't claim that. but it is "usable" and where it falls short - extensible
EASILY by users (well you techy nerdy linux users - just write some .kbd
files, OR... generate some text-file dictionaries. the dictionary is simply:
sort -f /usr/share/dict/words from your favorite linux desktop dictionary - so
any spanish, french, german, whatever dictionary "should work" just by stealing
it from a desktop and throwing it in with the existing dictionaries (system
dicts are in /usr/lib/enlightenment/modules/illume/dicts/ and a user can
install them as themselves... if they don't have root access (moot for OM, but
for other systems.. relevant) in ~/.e/e/dicts/ - your personal dictionary that
learns what you type (and how often you type it) is
~/.e/e/dicts-dynamic/personal.dic - same format (text), and in addition it also
supports ~/.e/e/dicts-dynamic/data.dic - you won't see it, but this is a file
that is "expected" to be auto-generated from "personal data" - eg your contacts
list (all names, addresses etc.) get stolen from your contacts every now and
again and put in this file. these get mixed in with the dictionary matching
logic. the keyboard layout files work the same way. ~/.e/e/keyboards/ contains
personal .kbd layouts (that always take preference to system ones)
and /usr/lib/enlightenment/modules/illume/keyboards/ contains system .kbd files
- just copy one and start editing - put in one of those dirs. they are basic
text files defining an area for the keyboard (virtual area/size), fuzz value
(how far from a press point should the key hunting go to find possible
mis-presses) as well as type of keyboard (used for auto-keyboard protocol
hinting to find which keyboard to use) and icon... and keys. just look at the 3
keyboard provided by default. 

note - assumed is UTF-8 for all dictionaries and keyboard files. so make a
spanish, german, russian etc. keyboard file. add the accented characters you
want/need. *I* can't do all this for you. i can do some, but it is better that
native speakers of these languages do this and address their own language
needs. i HOPE i have covered this. if i haven't - patches accepted. i am not
sure if the dictionary matching will work as well as i hoped when it comes to
accented UTF-8 etc. characters, but i did write it to do so, so if it doesn't -
it's a bug. i am guessing it should handle greek and cyrillic scripts (and
languages) as i think these are just the same principle as latin based
languagese - just different charactersets. you will need to make your own .kbd
files with your keys on it and dictionary files.

unfortunately... this keyboard ... does not help our asian friends much. it
does not include an input method - so for chinese you will need to add an input
method handler and use pinyin. for japanese - same, and type in romanji (though
in theory kana is possible with the keyboard - it may work instead of romanji.
untested) and for our korean friends... beats me! :)

other languages are a bit of a mystery to me. i can say anything right-to-left
is not going to have any support right now. evas doesn't know anything about
right-to-left. luckily it's a small minority of languages that are
right-to-left, but as i said - i know nothing of these. mystery to me. i can't
pretend to be able to support these - sorry guys! :(

> I'm testing the image right now and I have no as much luck as Dan, no
> GSM registering here (nor in 2008.8) but it doesn't matter, I post this
> to shout out loud , THIS IS THE KEYBOARD 2008.8 MUST HAVE!! is just
> awesome , you got all in one, if you need predictable one to write sms
> on the go , no problem, if you need one for terminal or for whatever
> aplication you put in there that OM can't predict in advance it's
> keyboard needs, no problem you got it , if you have to write one sms in
> english, an email in spanish and do you minutes in esperanto, again no
> problem switch the dictionary and go, it got the zoom feature too, and
> if any of the keyboards installed doesn't have succesfully satisfy
> you ... do your own keyboard editing a text file!
> What is offering the actual keyboard installed in 2008.8 that this one
> doesn't offer?, what feature I have missed?
> I'm totally agree in try to make the future OM branded distribution kb
> automatic oriented and let the user the option to install a manual
> button to force keyboard appear and disappear, but please use this kb
> instead the actual one.
> 
> Regards
> David
> 
> El mar, 19-08-2008 a las 00:43 -0500, Dan Staley escribió:
> > Hi everyone,
> > 
> > I recently flashed an image created by Raster (from a recent version of
> > the ASU dev tree but with his modifications...most noticably the
> > keyboard is changed to a modified version of the illume keyboard...and
> > very works very well!)  I think Raster mentioned that it can accept any
> > dictionary file for the predictive part of the keyboard, and you can
> > easily switch dictionaries with the top left button.  (Not to mention
> > there is a full qwerty keyboard option included!  Terminal friendly
> > ASU!)
> > 
> > Anyway, I just wanted to comment that with it, and several other recent
> > programs, I was able to very easily connect to a wifi network (via
> > terminal), connect my bluetooth keyboard, and chat in the #openmoko IRC
> > room via pidgin....and it worked great!  I've also used this image for a
> > couple days as my main phone and it seems to be pretty stable and
> > usable.  It wakes up out of suspend on phone calls and with the usual
> > mods to the gsmhandset.state file, it sounds fine. 
> > 
> > To see pics and descriptions of what I used, see here:
> > http://www.bufferunderflow.com/?entry=6
> > 
> > (Remember, Raster gets all the credit!  I'm just trying to spread the
> > good word about the image!)
> > 
> > -Dan Staley
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Openmoko community mailing list
> > community at lists.openmoko.org
> > http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Openmoko community mailing list
> community at lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community

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