Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
On Wed, 28 May 2008 19:14:46 -0400 Matt Mets <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> babbled:
Matt Mets wrote:
I tried out the ASU software update on my GTA01 tonight, and took a
short video of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ISHrtuQuGM
Cool video!
Thanks!
The keyboard seems quite nice, and worked well with a stylus (better
than the video might suggest, I was working around the camera).
What about the finger usability?
AFAIK the Qtopia predictive keyboard has been projected also to help in
finger usability...
I wasn't able to use the keyboard with my finger. Once a letter is pressed,
you can't slide to a neighboring letter to change it, so it was difficult to
correct mistakes. There was a different keyboard on the original Qtopia
builds that had a magnifying-key feature that seemed to make this easier. It
is entirely possible that I missed something here though. I do like the
gesture support (slide left to backspace, forward to insert space, down for
enter, up to switch keyboards), but I would like to see something that
indicates that gestures are being performed (perhaps a line that shows a
trail of where your finger has been?).
to correct - just backspace! :) (left slide). the magnifying thing is possible
- but somehow i saw it as superfluous as chances are u press and release very
fast like a keypress on a normal keyboard and then notice the mistake. even so
- the dictionary lookup will be correcting if it's in the dictionary and not
too far of a typo (press too far away from intended key). admittedly the
dictionary we ship has only 5000 words - but hey. it's a simple text file. :)
Ok, keeping that in mind, pressing in the general area and using the
word lookup feature seems to work pretty well with a finger. At least i
have been able to put in some simple phrases quite easily.
The predictive keyboard bit might help but I haven't become proficient with
it yet. It seemed weird that it shows two lists of possible words (one
horizontal across the top of the keyboard, one in a dropdown box).
horizontal is for quick selecting the most likely matches for correction (or if
no matches - exactly what you typed), and if it doesn't fit u can access ALL
matches from the popup list.
One other thing I noticed was that the widget for the popup window
covers up the leftmost horizontal match or two, making it impossible to
select them.
Also, when running a regular X application (remote xterm), it seemed like I
had to press enter (or tab) to get the characters to be sent to the app,
which made it very difficult to enter things into the terminal. But
usability in actual phone-apps is probably more important :-D. Perhaps a
direct-input mode is/could be implemented for that sort of application.
it's possible we can do this - in svn there is even a full qwerty kbd layout i
initially used - with ctrl, alt, etc. for terminal junkies, BUT for now
correction is always-on.
Here is a funny idea: how about replacing the word lookup with
bash-style command completion when in the terminal? That could be
really cool! Maybe the word lookup feature already has an interface
that can be hooked into. I could see it being useful for auto-completing
really any application-specific data as well. :-D For example, maybe in
the dialer program to show your closest contacts that match the number
(one of my favorite features of the GTK-dialer).
The whole interface was very smooth though. I'm suddenly much more
optimistic about the project!
--
Treviño's World - Life and Linux
http://www.3v1n0.net/
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