Re: [Announce] portrait-keyboard: Portrait-friendly system-wide keyboard
 

for what it is worth this is my preferred layout,
features:
1) offset keys for increased press accuracy
2) "." and "," keep the same position
3) "-" doesn't change position.
4) "/" and "\" don't change position.
5) you see a your background plication.
6) key hight is the same as landscape keyboard just width changes.


http://www.jdidesign.com/files-in/ma...keyboard-3.jpg
http://www.jdidesign.com/files-in/ma...keyboard-2.jpg
http://www.jdidesign.com/files-in/ma...keyboard-4.jpg
http://www.jdidesign.com/files-in/ma...keyboard-1.jpg

Re: [Announce] portrait-keyboard: Portrait-friendly system-wide keyboard
 

While this is nice in theory, it doesn't work well for structurally clean implementations -- since a keyboard is made of rows made of buttons, each button is rectangular, not hexagonal. Now if the layout for display is handled separately from input (a rather ugly architecture), you can make it work, but I think it would make handling different layouts rather harder.

And AFAIK, seeing the background application is rather complicated -- Nokia eliminated the stylus keyboard in Maemo 5, and any unexercised functionality for partial-screen input methods is likely to be buggy.

tl;dr: I totally agree with you, but I fear practicalities conspire against us.

Re: [Announce] portrait-keyboard: Portrait-friendly system-wide keyboard
 

I think it would still work if the second row of keys was just bigger still rectangular.
http://www.jdidesign.com/files-in/ma...keyboard-5.jpg


not sure you are right here is a screen-shot from my phone and it is there at the top. if they removed it they will just have to add it back.

http://www.jdidesign.com/files-in/ma...keyboard-6.jpg

Re: [Announce] portrait-keyboard: Portrait-friendly system-wide keyboard
 

I think I wasn't clear -- I'm not saying that layout's unattainable, just that there's no typability advantage from the staggered keys, because the click will still go to whatever key is occupying that pixel.

What I believe you were intending is that if a click is exactly centered between the Q and W, and only a pixel above the edge of the A, we'd count it as an A, and there's not a simple way to do that.

You're absolutely right -- I'd forgotten the title area still shows above the keyboard (and also, now that I think of it, the symbol keyboard has an even bigger area). Since the keyboard is not really fullscreen, there should be no trouble arbitrarily sizing it.

Re: [Announce] portrait-keyboard: Portrait-friendly system-wide keyboard
 

Yip I got it, thanks Benson I was thinking if there was a border around the key where touch was not recognized there would be an advantage in the dead space above and below the key, but that said i think i prefer having a bigger key as apposed to playing with the key position.

Unfortunately it still a pipe dream.

Re: [Announce] portrait-keyboard: Portrait-friendly system-wide keyboard
 

While I dream here is a featureI think works well.
http://lifehacker.com/5565061/swype-...-next-few-days

Re: [Announce] portrait-keyboard: Portrait-friendly system-wide keyboard
 

Yeah that is some awesome keyboard app.

Re: [Announce] portrait-keyboard: Portrait-friendly system-wide keyboard
 

Surely it should be possible to somehow port Swype over to Maemo?

Is Swype open sourced? If so is the Android system soo different that a port would be hard to do?

Re: [Announce] portrait-keyboard: Portrait-friendly system-wide keyboard
 

No, it isn't. And yes, it is. Unfortunately.

If you want to see something like this though, by all means, feel free to work with the code we have and see what you can do.

Re: [Announce] portrait-keyboard: Portrait-friendly system-wide keyboard
 

although this app would be EXTREMELY useful to me, after realizing the on screen landscape keyboard goes away, i can't use it, as the on-screen keyboard has symbols the physical keyboard does not. if that issue were fixed there would much more perked interest by the community.

fyi..i am not a coder/programmer, just a tinkerer with wishful thinking and a suggestion.