Until now Plasma active had an on screen keyboard that served us well, but due to its implementation had some limits that couldn’t be easily overcome.
However there is a Qt based virtual keyboard project that is very promising: Maliit
It’s the one that was used in the Nokia N9, and already made a good progress since the version used there.
To have a good user experience on Plasma Active it should be well integrated, both as in look and behavior with the rest of the environment. Luckily Maliit is transitioning itself as well to the use of QML to write the user interface, making very easy to switch to a platform specific UI while all the logic stays untouched (I must say I’m quite impressed by this input method framework).
This is the result of just some hours of work towards a keyboard interface that uses Plasma UI components, and hopefully it will be in the next Plasma Active release.
Hi,
That looks nice though it does seem a little bit sloppy. Barely but noticeable.
Also, perhaps it’s a good idea to blur the transparent bigger key that you see when you “hover” a key. Right now it looks a little odd. I don’t know if that device is powerful enough for that and remain smooth..
Cool! I hope you enhance the keyboard by some features that I desperately miss from all other tablets I have tried so far: A separate numpad, or a third row for special characters. I’m tired of having to long-press characters to get to special characters or even switch to another level to get punctuation.
“though it does seem a little bit sloppy.”
can you be more specific?
any news on a possible plasma desktop port? will active eventually become a plasma workspace like netbook and desktop, would be amazing for hybrid devices like the dell duo and other transforming machines
Hi Aaron,
Sure. Sloppy was perhaps the wrong word. It seem to be having a bit of lag. By hat i mean that the time between the press of a character and the visual feedback of the bigger character “seems” to be notably long. Perhaps input lag?
It could just be an impression and not notably in real life. I don’t have a vivaldi to play with so perhaps you should take this with a grain of salt.
Unfortunately, the Ogg link gives an MP4 with an error message instead of the OGV; it looks like Blip.tv doesn’t support downloads anymore. 🙁
The good news is that the YouTube link works fine in HTML5 mode.
This is quite strange, Blip.tv used to be the good guys and YouTube the bad guys, now it’s the opposite.
@tomm: “any news on a possible plasma desktop port?”
Active and Desktop have shared the same on-screen keyboard for a while now. once this is stabilized, i expect this to be what we use on the desktop as well (the current plasmoid has two benefits still -> it can be docked into panels and what not, it does not require compositing which maliit does)
“will active eventually become a plasma workspace like netbook and desktop”
it already is a plasma workspace, and has been from the very start.
we need to add it to the workspaces pages on http://www.kde.org though…
@BajK: there is a bug tracker for general feature requests: https://bugs.maliit.org/ But if the requests are specifically about the PlasmaActive plugin, notmart is probably the guy to talk to, for now. He and I hope to work a bit on better QML experience for Maliit plugin developers (in the context of Plasma Active) during aKademy.