Hi all, If anyone is interested in the upcoming IME/IMF work being done in the roadmap, you can now start looking at the code for it included in the cupcake branch. This is still far from finished, but is in good enough shape to start using and writing IMEs against; though there will still be some changes to the APIs, I don't expect any major ones at this point.
The start of some sample code for writing an IME is here: http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/development.git;a=tree;f=samples/SoftKeyboard;hb=cupcake This is purely there as a sample, and not as a complete implementation of a fully-featured soft keyboard. There also should be much more documentation showing up in the near future. In builds being done in the cupcake branch, the sample soft keyboard should be built for you and enabled. This means that if you tap on an edit text in the UI, and you don't have the hard keyboard available, you will get the soft keyboard sample to enter text in to. There are a few important things for app developers to know about interacting well with the new input method system, which we will be talking about more as the branch stabilizes and is ready for use as an SDK: - There is a new android:inputType attribute and a setInputType() method on TextView for controlling how your text should be managed. These replace the android:password, android:singleLine, android:numeric, android:phoneNumber, android:inputMethod, android:capitalize, android:autotext, android:editable attributes and let you specify additional details about your text. People developing against cupcake should use android:inputType in all new code. The framework does interpret the old attributes into a new style input type, but where you can it is good to update to android:inputType so you can supply the additional information. - There is a new "softInputMode" you can specify for a window, to control whether the soft keyboard is displayed automatically when your window is shown and whether your window is panned or resized when it is shown. You can specify this either with Window.setSoftInputMode(), in a custom Theme, or with a new android:windowSoftInputMode attribute on an activity in its manifest. In general I think the system does a decent job of deciding what to do with windows automatically, but there will certainly be cases where you want to specify this yourself, especially to have the soft keyboard displayed automatically. - The way a user gets to a soft keyboard is by pressing on an editable text view. This means that applications must not implement their own behavior for tapping on it. - The new InputMethodManager class (which get be retrieved by getSystemService()) provides programmatic control of the soft keyboard. Have fun! -- Dianne Hackborn Android framework engineer [email protected] Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support. All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "android-framework" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-framework?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
