So, there I was pretending my phone has a touchscreen while I wait for GTA02 when this idea popped into my head for a keyboard alternative. I would very much like to hear thoughts. The design would remove the onscreen keyboard completely and replace it with a Graffiti-like interface that can recognize something as wide as a finger or as tiny as a stylus. A couple of icons for a symbols list and other essentials that the user may not want to write out (ex www., .com or greek letters) will be all that's left of the keyboard. For the sake of minimalism, the entire screen, excluding the very top or bottom where the icons are, will be used as the input area. The app should be activated or deactivated with one touch just like the current keyboard. It would have to have some excellent text recognition as well as a built in dictionary to suggest words, which should make up for any holes in the text recognition. Also, a find as you write feature will be handy for finding folders in the main menu, names in the contact list or numbers in the logs, basically reducing scrolling through areas that aren't primarily text based. The benefits of this finger graffiti are that it has a learning curve of zero, eliminates hunting and pecking so anyone can write quickly without needing to get used to the onscreen keyboard. Oh yeah, it's as fast as you can move your fingers and it can easily be done one handed. I have little experience with programming and I hardly do more than write little time saving scripts nowadays, so I honestly have no concept of what such an app would take. What d'you guys think?
_______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
