Re: New onscreen keyboard
 

Can't bitwise operations be used to change color on the fly?

Re: New onscreen keyboard
 

I think its a great idea Bruce.I would imagine a solution like the full screen keyboard semi transparently overlayed over the page/app you are working in, but instead of freezing the background: keep it live, so you can see what you type in the actual app. This would also free up some keyboard space for eg. a proper shift key. (or would this require Apple's much copyrighted 'multi touch')?

In terms of the readability concern - i think it might just work - the qwerty keyboard doesnt need to be terribly dominating - we all know a keyboards layout. Or otherwise one could try for a fancy graphic technique like inverting the background, or XORing it?

If it works Id even go so far as dreaming of a hardware 'keyboard on/keyboard off' switch. Hint hint nokia...

Re: New onscreen keyboard
 

You can have the transparancy settable by user in realtime directly on the keyboard. I think one can find what suits him the best.
You can have it movable and/or collapsible (but without resizing main window). It can fill less than half screen and have one button/arrow to jump to top or bottom of the screen quickly, that way you can move it out of the way with single click.

I think current biggest issue (apart from having less space in general) is the act of resizing main application window. Resizing will be always slow and will cause various headaches. So the key is NOT to resize but overlay main window(with transparency) and have the keyboard quickly switchable to top/bottom to move it out of way when you need to interact.

Re: New onscreen keyboard
 

Good idea fanoush. The color scheme could be inverted by the user as well.

Re: New onscreen keyboard
 

An alternative keyboard I've used (on Palm) is called MessagEase.

They show an N800 on their page, but don't list it in the downloads (they show iPhone too, I think they're just trying to drum up interest by showing potential uses).

http://www.exideas.com/ME/index.html

It takes practice, but it uses little screen space and is very fast and reliable. It has 9 boxes for common letters, for the remainder you drag across the box.

If you really want to see how it works, there is a free trial of a PC version (meant for tablets, but you can work it with a mouse).

Re: New onscreen keyboard
 

i'm willing to bet that the current built-in keyboard is an executable somehwere. We need to find out where it is and then try replacing it with a test app, although this might be bad if we lose control of key inputs...i'll look around my n800

I did a search and came up with all of these results.
I also Googled and got this page: http://www.mail-archive.com/ubuntu-m...keyboard.patch

referencing matchbox-keyboard, but this is for the under development ubuntu mobile, so even though it's hildon, n800 might not have it.

AND not sure why I didn't remember this: http://blog.gustavobarbieri.com.br/2...oard-for-n800/

it might not be integrated into the system, but it's a start. I still think overlaying the keyboard is better than popping up a fullscreen for the keyboard.

Now what do we do? Maybe some concept layout images?

Re: New onscreen keyboard
 

BTW, the kayboard example above is written in PYTHON, not C++ with some nice Py libs. I found a link already on maemo more about it: http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/v...f6e86f7bb.html

Looks pretty awesome, not sure why it took me so long to hear about this!

Re: New onscreen keyboard
 

Yes please, concept images with real life use cases. Meaning take real screenshots of things like Email and Notes and then draw on top of those.