This is a plea to programmers for a very simple program. (That is, as a non-programmer it looks simple to me. ) It's a little app that I use on the desktop that would be perfect for the Tablets. I have posted a screenshot of it below.

It's called TypeItIn. Here is its website. Unfortunately it can't just be ported, as it's a Windows program. Basically, it's a GUI for typing macros.

It's just a list of buttons: you press one of the buttons, and it types whatever you have instructed it to type, in the text entry area of whatever website or program you have active. The list is always on top, unless you have minimized it. The very best would be if you could make it always reside in, and minimize to, maemo's status bar. With the N800's lack of a keyboard, and the N810's non-standard keyboard, it would be an incredible help on the NITs.

I use it to fill in forms (e.g., name and address, username and password for email accounts, credit card numbers, ...), to put my return address into letters, etc. You can make it type whole sentences that you reuse. For the tablet, I would love to have it for Xterm to automatically (and correctly!) type commands that I reuse.

I have uploaded an old (1999) freeware version of the program. (TypeItIn exists now only in its more powerful shareware incarnation, but I figure the old freeware version is fair game to post.)

The more powerful TypeItIn offers the ability to choose among different lists. So I have a list for credit card purchases (that's the list in the photo), a list for my numerous email accounts, ... Those are able to be password-protected. I have a couple other lists I chose not to password-protect, like a list that has my address, my library card number, my email addresses (without passwords), etc. If coded for maemo, I would have a list of reusable Linux commands that I could type in just by clicking a button with my stylus!

Well, I hope someone shows an interest. It would be a real service to the Tablet community.

Thanks for reading this! I hope you're interested.

I have thought something like this would be helpful too. On the PalmOS there were a few extra little graffiti symbols you could write that were macros for things like the current date, or date and time, and things like that. I think somebody around here has written a replacement "vertical keyboard" app, which maybe with some tweaking could do macros instead of single keystrokes.

You can already do handwriting gestures (in the HWR input method) for arbitrary strings. The "vertical keyboard" is just a special config file loaded in xkbd, which is a generalized on-screen keyboard. I don't think it can do multiple keypresses per tap, so it would be non-trivial to make that work.

There is an Xautomation build around; using xte from that, you can send such sequences, but the GUI part still needs done. A limited fix would be to use osso-statusbar-cpu (or powerlaunch) in conjunction with xte.