I hacked around this weekend and got the beginnings of a new input method put together:


It is loosely based on the hexinput method described here.

It has configuration loading stubbed out already, the interface mostly works, and it can send output to the outside world (although only by printing to the console right now). I still have a lot of work to do - I have to make some bitmaps for the buttons that aren't simple letters, I need to develop a mechanism for non-letteral keys to use when activated (like the fx keys, arrows, etc.), and I need to tie it into KDE. It doesn't actually do anything yet unfortunately, but you can play around with it:
hexinput.py

I suggest trying it on a desktop computer though as it is still dead slow on my N800 and has some annoying bugs

Edit: Watch out for the ugly font rendering too. I'm using colorkey transparency on the fonts because they weren't blitting transparently, but on Maemo Pygame can only render fonts antialiased. I was using hot-pink as my transparent color, but with antialiased fonts all the letters had pink halos. So now I am using (15,0,15) as my transparent color, but the antialiased font still comes with a halo, only now it is a black bubble... Guess I need to use white then