In in an old screencast for Plasma Mobile, you seen a demonstration of an on-screen keyboard, it was a working proof of concept, but the interactin was still a bit wonky…
I love when those things happen: The autor of that plasmoid, Bjorn Ruberg (hats off) seen it and wanted to do something about… the result is a completely reworked widget, (that will be shipped with SC 4.5) now it’s faster, it has a way smaller memory footprint and more important is way more accurate now. typing on it has became quite fast.
In this little video it’s shown the keyboard widget working in an external little app that takes over a part of the screen (designed for small mobile devices) on the small Jax10 and on a larger old via-based tablet.
We should try to add something like that in KDM :/
What about capital letters? Can you combine two keys pressed at once (Shift-key along with the letter to be placed in capital)?
Nassos
The problem with that kind of keyboars that try to mimic real ones layout is that keys are to small, especially on small screens.
I’ve been working on an onscreen keyboard for a few days, as I needed one written in QT. It’s meant to be displayed on small screen (my netbook in portrait mode), for an ebook reader I’m writing.
You can find screen grabs on :
http://vtoniazzi.free.fr/temp/captures.zip
I’d gladly share the source code if someone wanted to turn it into a plasma widget.
Nice thing about the new version of the keyboard is that it stores the layouts in xml files. They can be exchanged on the fly. Currently I provide the basic keyboard as above, a keyboard with functional keys and a full pc-105 keyboard with keypad. I will still add a layout for 9 inch tablets and one for MIDs.
Right now, since X doesn’t support multitouch, you press shift, it sticks then you press the letter and the shift goes away.
Once X supports multitouch, with the qt api will be -very- easy to write support for key combinations
Yeah, keys are still too small. According to some old maemo usability data button comfortable for finger use should be at least 9mm wide/high. Maybe it is too excessive, you could probably shave 1, maybe 2mm but keys on those screencast looked much smaller.
Whereas this on-screen keyboard is a good thing and a welcomed additions. As said by others, it should be improved on several fronts :
– too muuch keys displayed
– too small keys
IMHO it would have been interesting to be able to change keybord layout : normal, phone, mixed/compact.
You could also have word suggestions.
Some example from mobile platform. i do appreciate the HTC sense on-screen keyboard with 3 different layouts :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJCNav8Odcc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j1XfbixNN8&feature=related
I already commented that the layouts are exchangeable already in trunk and that I will add one suiting better for mids and small tablets. The layout you see in the keyboard suits for 13 inch tablet subnotebooks I think.
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