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

Hi all,

This is an early, crazy, work-in-progress announcement regarding a portrait keyboard for Maemo5 that frals and I are working on in our copious free time. See screenshots below for fun.

Since people keep pointing this out, I'm moving it up here and emphasising it: Worth noting that this is originally written by Nokia, from one of the hildon-input-method examples. We did not write this from scratch.

It is now available from extras-devel, package name is 'portrait-keyboard'.

Known caveats:

• No fast input. Multi-tap to enter a letter, it's slow and *very* painful.
• Changing orientation results in the text you've written so far being lost
• To use it, you'll need to 'killall hildon-input-method' after installing the package (or reboot your n900)
• It's (a bit) painful to use in landscape mode.

Possible future directions (but this is by no means going to happen overnight, these are all quite difficult - feel free to pitch in and help):

• Seperate layout for landscape mode, for easier use
• Fast, predictive input
• Automatic capitalisation

If you're interested in contributing, talk to frals or myself (w00t / w00t_) on #maemo, and see http://gitorious.org/hildon-portrait-keyboard.

Much thanks to Stskeeps and yerga for sending me in the right direction with getting it working, and awesome kudos to frals for getting this in a releasable state.

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

I just see one piece of awesomeness over here! =)

Keep up the good work guys!

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

Keep up the good work.

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

great work!

nokia. can you plz pay these guys, they are doing your job!

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

Hehey I think a lot of people in here are eagerly awaiting what you come up with.

Just a further/clarifying question, though: so are there plans for a mini-QWERTY keyboard?

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

Keep in mind the bottom of my post. This was originally written by Nokia.

So far, all we've done is package it for Maemo5. (Though hopefully we'll add more bits to it as I mentioned :))

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

No firm plans really. It's just the idea I had in my head when I thought about this initially. Whether it gets implemented, well, depends whether we write it - or someone else decides to help contribute it :)

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

I will have a look.
I am thinking about gestures (like hit a char, slide up, get the uppercase version, and viceversa; slide left -> delete; slide right -> TAB and so on)

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

Plausible, but I forsee that being a bit difficult with something like T9..

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

Great job w00t!

Will ukeyboard with different input languages get effected if i install this?

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

I don't believe so. Pretty sure I have it installed at the moment without issues, but then, I don't use it a lot :-)

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

but even so. they should have finished the job.

anyway. keep up the great work. need to pay more attantion to what you do on your free time ;)

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

This is kinda like I was referencing on Twitter, except slightly different.

Tap and hold say 1 and four choices come up for 1, a, b and c within reach of the number 1, a mini-menu of sorts, but it would need to be fast and fluid. Could be displayed the typical N S E W locations, or maybe possibly a semi-circle which appears at the users preference of an angle?

Could have it be an option, so the user could go either old style T9 or with something similar to above.

You could add a quick toggle, on the mini-menu, to make the letters in caps? Maybe even if input is pressed and held the mini-menu doesn't go away, useful if the user is going to be using another letter.

It works in my head. :D

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

One issue I see is not being able to toggle between standard onscreen keyboard and the portrait mode one. Is there a place to identify this? If there a way to make the portrait mode keyboard show up when the phone is rotated?

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

Can this be used alongside the regular VKB. For instance, it will only popup when in portrait mode?

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

Not really, which is why there is a note that we should improve landscape mode to be more usable.. somehow.

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

A dictionary for the T9 would be great.. Just like the other Nokia phones.. you double tap the # and it will turn on the dictionary then you can 344 for "egg" for example.. etc

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

It's also impossible to make a third plugin which loads both, the normal landscape and the example portrait plugin, and shows up the correct one fitting to the screen rotation?
Don't know if you got my point, it's late here and I'm tired :D

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

I'll not say it's impossible, but h-i-m is a bit complicated. If you'd like to give it a crack and see if it's possible though, by all means.. :)

One complexity you'd have is to synchronise text etc between the two plugins when they're rotated.

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

This would get in the way of something like MSCIM, right? Or is it possible to get those two to play nice together?

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

I don't know it well, but from a quick look, it would probably replace it. You can't use multiple input methods at once.

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

I have no developer knowledge of the N900 platform :p

But could you possible implement:

Structered english :

Would tht be possible?

I am going by my reasonable alright level of knowledge of JAVA programming. So I cannot give actual code for maemo but I understand structured english and someone with more brains on this area should possibly be able to implement this as an extra part of the portrait function?

Just trying to help :)

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

make it atleast T9 compatible and usable or else just stop the effort. this is allready been done in vertsms.

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

I don't think you quite understand what this is. Unlike vertsms, this works everywhere you have text input - it's a regular virtual keyboard, not a separate application.

Vertsms is really not a good way to do things.. asking every application to implement its own keyboard (or creating separate applications for portrait usage) is not a productive way to do things, as it either involves duplicating whole applications, or at the least, everyone creating their own keyboard solution which looks and feels slightly different from everything else. That's the whole reason this exists.

That having been said, if you'd taken a closer look at the initial post, you would notice that 'fast predictive input' is already listed under 'future direction'.

Thanks!

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

Someone else already suggested this above. It's not really straightforward (it's not easy, and there are also some complications to that situation).. because of that, I don't think I want to put my effort into this at least, I'd rather make a (different) landscape layout in the same plugin which was more suited to landscape usage.

I'd welcome input from anyone else who wants to try, though.

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

Hmmm.... I wonder if it's possible to port to Diablo...

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

I don't know enough about Diablo unfortunately. Patches welcome, though.

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

First up,

It is GREAT that you guys are doing this! You have no idea how I, and everyone else, am thankful. Few suggestions:

1- Make it QWERTY. I know T9 is closed source as far as I know, so at least make it QWERTY. If you could use the the design from Witter's Portrait Keyboard, that would be fantastic! ABC DEF GHI is a very tedious method.

2- The original Virtual Landscape Keyboard does come in handy and the new one in PR 1. is fantastic. Can this app be transformed and installed as a "language" in ukeyboard? This way we can still maintain the older vkb if we want to.

3- Also, how do you remove it if you want old keyboard back? Simple uninstall?

Thanks for the effort! :) This is amazing!

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

I really, really don't want a qwerty keyboard for portrait input, because I have big fingers. I find it hard enough typing on the normal keyboard in landscape mode. I suspect the same is true for a fair number of other people. However:

T9 is pretty easy to implement. There's also various other options for fast input, and we will be doing one of them. I agree that multiple press input sucks. :-)

I don't think so, but we can probably introduce some alternative for fast switching. Other things (like better input) are more important for the time being though I think, so if this is something you'd want to work on(?) I'm sure that we can help you do it.

Yes. Should work.

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

Did you see the Portrait Keyboard on Witter? (That sounds dirty, dunno why!) It is fantastic. Plus, the trick with portrait keyboard is the press+and+hold idea, where you press and release once you are sure you are on the right button. If you want an A and you press an S, you just slide your finger to the A, like you would on the unmentionable Voldemort of phone, the ip*one.

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

please please please make a QWERTY keyboard would play for that right now.

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

Could you make a smaller version of this?

I find VertSMS buttons a bit big, which makes farther buttons harder to reach with right thumb. But yours look promising too. Just my opinion.

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

Now this is what we need... a global landscape / portrait vkb...... !!

need to be able to easily change it between qwerty and current style in either portrait or landscape and have auto rotate then the N900 would be the perfect device!

it already has GPS app (turn-by-turn) and MMS, now it just needs global portrait with auto rotating vkb (between landscape and portrait.)

:D

THANKS w00t / frals !

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

Question woot if this would be implemented already how would the default applications be rotated to portrait? Should we do the shift+r thingy to make it portrait everytime or you would implement a global orientation changer also? I mean it wouldnt be right if keyboard is portrait but the application isn't right?

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

i always ask for this

QW ER TY keyboard i think is the best of both worlds and with predictive input is even better

(BB pearl style or nokia e55 keyboard)

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

a QWERTY version would be gr8 :)

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

I would say, IDEALLY, it should be possible to select between a qwerty and T9-ish version for both the portrait and the landscape keyboards separately. But I realize that's extra coding and possible headache-inducing-bugs, so as someone who's not in a position to contribute, I don't have room to complain. But if you're aiming for an integrated keyboard that's useful for every application in portrait mode, that would probably make the community at large experience all the more joy from the end product.

That said, honestly, if I'm able to make myself at all useful for this project before it's done, I'd be happy to contribute.

- EDIT -

And while I remember, massive thank you to the people working on this. Between this and the possibly-to-happen USB-host-mode I read about a couple of days ago, this is pretty much all the N900 needs to be perfect in every way for every-day-use in my book.

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

full Keyboard/T9 switching using accelerometer would be great. I know it's hard to achieve that but there is always a posibility. Remember? Nokia 5800 has both T9 and virtual Keyboard. Also the SONY Ericsson SATIO has that too. I'm sure it is possible to make them switchable with an applet :)

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

Anyway, after wandering around for a while thinking of how awesome this project is and how I looked forward to using it, I suddenly went - "wait, usually when a topic has [Announce] in it, there's something already being released," (at least so it seems so far), so, being that I, like all newbs following proper precautions, have had Extras-Testing and Extras-Devel enabled from the day I got my N900 (seriously, I may be a programing and Linux newb but I figured I could figure out how to reflash if need be - totally worth it), I went and checked app manager, and there was the portrait keyboard, all nice and shiny and waiting to be tested.

That said - at first I couldn't get the virtual keyboard, until I thought to check the instructions in the first post. "killall hildon...whatever-the-command-was" (just looked it up again hildon-input-method), and it worked like a charm. I spent about five minutes typing this post one-handed in portrait mode. (N900 is heavier than I notice when using both hands on the physical keyboard, turns out.) Then I just barely tilted the device beyond a not-exactly obvious point, and it switched to landscape, lol, so that was time well spent. :) I'm guessing making the entered text able to stay between mode switch would be high on your to-fix list, so I'm not complaining. That said, I find I often like to lie sideways while entering text so if possible, a lock button on the keyboard would be nice at some far off future which allows you to toggle on/off rotation. I don't know how complex that would be, but since it only needs to effect the vkb itself, I hope it wouldn't need too much programming.

Anyway, beyond that, text entry isn't too painfully slow except for when I hit a word using two letters in a row on the same key. (I hated typing "feels", lol.) One thing I would like to see implemented (which you may be intending to do) soon is switching the caps key from a toggle to a more typical hit-once-for-one-capitalized-letter, hit-twice-for-caps-lock arrangement. Maybe that's a your-mileage-may-vary thing though, so ideally you could put that into settings too, but I personally think the toggle is less practical for quick text entry than the more standard cell-phone shift-key behavior (but, of course, your choice if you have to go with only one).

Even before you get T9 behavior, if you can get the cursor to flash or highlight the letter being worked on that would be great (this too might be something you're already planning to do). I think the same code can probably be then extended to whatever word is being typed once you get T9-like functionality. The main thing right now is that you can't tell how quickly the vkb will let you type the next letter, or if it's still holding the previous letter hostage in case you hit the same key. I was also surprised that upon backspacing, the letter before the deleted one was 'taken hostage' again. I'm not sure if this was intended, but if it was, the aforementioned cursor-flashing/high-lighting would help. I also notcie that while normally you may be able to hit, say, a 3 immediately after typing a B, and it'll go to Bd, if you have, say, "BT", and backspace the T and then immediately hit 3, it'll override the B with a d. (Let me know if that's unclear and I'll try to explain better.)

The only real obvious "bug" right now is integration with all the programs. I tried it, so far, with Conversations (works perfectly), Notes (works perfectly), X-Term (doesn't actually enter the text when you close the vkb - you enter text, but when you press the button to hide the vkb the text doesn't appear - I also got some lag when switching between portrait and landscape in X-Term with vkb open, BUT I think that was just a random moment, not vkb related), MicroB (same as X-Term for every text box. I figured this out when trying to log in here [attentive readers will remember I started typing this post in the vkb - this was because I was planning to type, copy+paste, and then log in, but by the time I logged in I decided to go with hardware kb - trying to half slide open the keyboard to Ctrl+C the post would not have been worth the risk of losing all of this if I had typed it in vkb]. I also tested this in google's search box and the actual post entry box here, so it's not just password/username entry fields or this site - if you already have text entered in the box, it brings it up in the vkb, but when you close it additions aren't saved - though I only tested adding text at the end - maybe additions elsewhere, deltions, or replacements would register - I think not though; but, it does work perfectly with MicroB's address/search entry field), fMMS (works perfectly), FireFox (the one from Maemo select) (same for in-page text boxes as MicroB - keyboard just doesn't come up for address bar), Midori (vkb works perfectly for address bar, doesn't come up for text boxes in-browser), X-Chat (Works perfectly), Opera (over-ridden by Opera's own virtual keyboard, which is just fine by me because yours will be vastly supperior soon, so unless some blasphemer wants Opera Mobile over MicroB, that's not a problem. Seriously though, you may be able to see if you can override Opera's and give that option to people who want your vkb with that browser, though that's likely to be more of a pain to code into happening).

So, over all I like. Indeed, the above is amazingly good, non-buggy functionality for something that's just released. It also gave me no problems with the Marina theme on my N900 - I wasn't expecting it to, but others may have, so extra reassurance there. Pretty much I think all you need to sort is MicroB's in-browser text-box entry, and the rest of the browsers would fall into place (just my barely-educated guess, though..). If I used my N900 as a phone rather than as a very tiny netbook packed with awesome, this vkb as-is would fullfil almost all my needs with just the above tweeks, as it's almost good enough for comfortably texting/IMing as-is, I think.

Now, who wants to tell me if this is actually where I should be putting my feedback (and where do I vote on this)?

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

I'm trying this at some time :) That keeps me away from learning :D