On Thursday 18 December 2008, clare johnstone wrote: > On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 8:28 PM, Paul <[email protected]> wrote: > > Is there a way to make the keyboard pop up on demand, say for the > > terminal? > > Or did you just mean: press the tiny little mark at centre top of the > screen. A curtain 1/3 the size of the screen will wander down. At its top > right corner is the word "qwerty". if you press that a keyboard will > appear. > Later you can repeat to make the keyboard disappear.
Yes, it is now frustratingly longwinded. The keyboard icon on the matchbox panel is much better in my opinion. Even better would be a keyboard icon that brought up the default keyboard if tapped, but if held would pop up a list of available keyboards or layouts. > The keyboard has a sign in some oriental language at its top right > which causes changes in it. Basically 3 possibles, of which the third > can be quite useful if you can get it to respond. It is "ABC" with the characters overlapping slightly. It needn't be 3 choices either - you can add or remove keyboard layouts as you wish. You could remove all but the terminal layout if that's the only one you want. People have produced alternative layouts better suited to other languages too. The top left lets you pick the dictionary to be used for the corrective input, so you could have multiple languages available. > It has the habit of enlarging its characters > when they are pressed which may be helpful when trying to use fingers > to type on it but slows it. It can be a little distracting, but it doesn't seem to compromise performance. It seems to keep up with ~4 characters per second - as fast as I can hit characters in short bursts anyway. Sometimes I get characters from a long way from where I tapped, but I suspect that's the touchscreen driver causing problems since I have the same problem with the matchbox keyboard. > It also at times develops a habit known as predictive. Corrective would be more accurate, and whether it is enabled depends on the keyboard layout. The icon in the top left will give you the full list of potentially matching words, with the exact string you entered always at the top. The quality of correction is heavily dependant on the dictionary, at least out of the box. The default english dictionary works well, but some have reported problems with german for example. To some extent this should be offset if you persevere as it adds spellings and word frequencies to your personal dictionary, > I have actually been shown how this can be made to work on a mobile > phone where it may have some value. Agreed. With the corrective layout I can enter text reasonably reliably one handed while walking. I wouldn't have a hope of doing this with the terminal layout, or with the matchbox keyboard. > Compared with ordinary "tab completion" in linux commands it is not > even a starter, and again is a distraction.. But for linux commands surely you would use the terminal layout, which doesn't have the corrective feature enabled, and use tab completion. > clare (who really likes the matchbox keyboard - remember that?. It is > used in the new "hackable"; > and with apologies to Rasterman; but I do feel strongly on these points.) Input method preferences are highly personal. Happily we have a choice of input methods, and Rasterman included the facility to use them. If you install the matchbox keyboard, or any other for that matter, it should appear in the list of selectable keyboards in the illume config (spanner icon). I suspect part of the reason people tend to dislike the qtopia and default illume keyboards is that by default they don't do what we expect, and it isn't obvious what they are doing. The matchbox keyboard is just an onscreen representation of a familiar keyboard, and behaves as we expect. It doesn't require any extra knowledge to get it to do what we want. The same could be said of the illume terminal layout, but that isn't the default. The qtopia and illume keyboards try to be better, as does the iPhone keyboard, but all require a bit of hidden knowledge to get them to work. Once you know their secrets they are as good as or better than the matchbox keyboard, but if you don't know the secrets then they are incredibly frustrating. _______________________________________________ support mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/support
