[Gta04-owner] Perfect on screen keyboard?

[Neil Jerram]

Radek Polak <psonek2 at seznam.cz> writes:

> Any other ideas for nice and usable keyboards?

I'm wondering about dasher, controlled by slight tilt movements, which
would be detected by the accelerometer and/or gyroscope.

Dasher already runs on the GTA04 with finger/stylus control, but there
are two problems with that: it needs two hands, and for right handed
people the finger/stylus hides a significant section of the letters
appearing from the right.  With tilt movements input could be done with
one hand, and the oncoming letters would not be obscured.

It needs prototyping to see if it would be really comfortable, so I may
try to work on that.  AFAICT from some very quick searching, it's been
done on a tablet [1] but not on a smartphone yet.

[1] http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/saw27/dasher/toshtilt/

I think the steps needed for GTA04 are:

- finished drivers for the accelerometer and/or gyroscope

- a program to take and process driver output and feed inputs into
  dasher's UDP socket input (like 'ToshTilt' mentioned at [1], but for
  GTA04)

- input method integration so that dasher appears automatically when
  a text field gets focussed (which can be done by using or modifying
  the matchbox-keyboard-im code)

- dasher UI modifications to hide things that aren't needed (the menu
  and toolbar) and add finger-friendly controls for what is needed
  (e.g. completing input and returning to the underlying app)

- optionally, UI tweaks to make it fit better in the look of the
  containing distribution.

Regards,
        Neil