Al thank you for the detailed reply; very encouraging. regards, clare On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 2:49 PM, Al Johnson <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >
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