Design Team/Proposals/Touchscreen/On-screen Keyboard

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Existing solutions

GNOME shell on screen keyboard

Gnome 3.2 on-screen Keyboard originally a GSoC 2011 project by Nohemi Fernandez, mentored by Dan Winship. Here is the original design document, project report, an interesting bugzilla thread, feature status pages, and a post from Nohemi's blog.

And here is the GNOME shell keyboard code. It is part of GNOME 3.2 (Fedora 16). You can get to it when you click on the accessibility button at the top right of the screen and enable 'Screen Keyboard'. It will come up then when you click in the url entry in Epiphany or if you bring it up by hand. It does not come up automatically when you want to type in the google search for example.

Caribou is the backend used with the gnome-shell onscreen keyboard. You can choose between different layouts which are placed in Fedora under '/usr/share/caribou/layouts/'. The layouts are in XML format. For the touch layout there is one for arabic and one for hebrew.

You can get the current layout with: 

 gsettings get org.gnome.shell.keyboard keyboard-type

You can change the layout with: 

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keyboard keyboard-type fullscale

Maliit

Malit You can run Maliit on Fedora 16: here are the installation guides for Fedora, latest available version is 0.91. On the XO this drags in 4,4 MB of QT and 12 MB of QT-X11. 

Put maliit.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/ 
yum install maliit-framework maliit-plugins

Now you can run the 'maliit-keyboard-viewer' example.

There are more examples as noted under the running instructions. You need to install 'maliit-framework-examples maliit-inputcontext-gtk3 maliit-inputcontext-gtk2' for that. And you need to update the immodues cache: 'gtk-query-immodules-3.0-32 > /usr/lib/gtk-3.0/3.0.0/immodules.cache'. Then instruct to use the Maliit IM_MODUE: 'export GTK_IM_MODULE=Maliit' and start your application: 

maliit-exampleapp-gtk3

Multilanguage

There are many different layouts for languages like German, French, Arabic and so on, in Fedora they are stored under '/usr/share/maliit/plugins/languages/'. The format of the layouts is XML. Here is an example for the a Spanish keyboard, a German keyboard and a more complex Arabic keyboard. The current selected keyboard can be seen in the Maliit gconf settings: 

gconftool-2 -R /maliit

You can change the keyboard like: 

gconftool-2 --type=list --list-type string --set /maliit/onscreen/active [libmaliit-keyboard-plugin.so,es]
gconftool-2 --type=list --list-type string --set /maliit/onscreen/enabled [libmaliit-keyboard-plugin.so,es]

Build from Source on the XO

Install the following rpms for build dependencies: 

yum install qt qt-x11 qt-devel libXcomposite-devel GConf2-devel gcc-c++ gcc make dbus-glib-devel dbus-devel gtk2-devel gtk3-devel git gtk-doc gobject-introspection-devel

Get the sources: 

git clone git://gitorious.org/maliit/maliit-framework.git
git clone git://gitorious.org/maliit/maliit-plugins.git

Build the sources:

  • First build the maliit-framework:
qmake-qt4
make
sudo make install
  • Then build the maliit-plugins (you need to disable the sound-feedback here):
qmake-qt4 CONFIG+=disable-qt-mobility
make
sudo make install
  • Instruct GTK to use the Maliit IM_MODULE:
gtk-query-immodules-3.0-32 > /usr/lib/gtk-3.0/3.0.0/immodules.cache

'. Then instruct to use the Maliit IM_MODUE: 'export GTK_IM_MODULE=Maliit' and start your application:

Issues

  • I got a build error (see as well discussion page) and therefore build without the test 'qmake-qt4 CONFIG+=notests'.
  • On Fedora 16/17 there is one issue where the keys that popup stay visible, this is tracked here.
  • On the XO the keyboard has a fullscreen black window as background: looks like this is because we do not supports tranclucent windows and Maliit 0.91.0 needs that, according to Jon this is fixed in master

Gnome Onscreen Keyboard

Gnome Onscreen Keyboard

Florenc

Florenc

Eekboard

eekboard see the developers blog for a video and more details, and some eek board on a Tablet notes. For F-15 and F-16 try the below (note I couldn't get the focus change events auto hide to work on 12.1.0 build 6 as desktop accessibility support is disabled): 

sudo yum install eekboard
eekboard -F

Previous research from Saymindu

Previous research from Saymindu


iOS

Here you can see screnshots from the existing on screen keyboard design in iOS.


Android

Here you can see screnshots from the existing on screen keyboard design in Android Ice Cream Sandwich on an Asus TF101.


Evaluation

Saymindu fvkbd

  • Pros.
    • Simple
    • Three vertical key rows allows maximum canvas visibility in landscape
    • Support for multilingual
    • Square keys
    • Supports pop-over character extras
  • Cons.
    • Small, non-standard space-var placement
    • Missing many characters needed for more than basic text input
    • Needs feature to lock open different keyboard layouts (Saymindu submitted a patch)
  • Unknowns
    • Non-Gnome dependencies?
    • Supports screen rotation?

Requirements

Needs

  • Multilingual text input (ability to switch at least between two languages)
  • International (ability to show custom international characters such as accents and currency symbols)
  • Key pop-over for quick access to extra characters (useful as well for above)
  • Landscape and portrait orientation (portrait has a better ratio of canvas to keyboard UI chrome)
  • Reveal on focus of text input widget entry, dismiss on defocus
  • Reveal and dismiss on screen keyboard UI manually
  • Slide canvas vertically to keep insertion point visible
  • Uppercase alphabet key theme
  • Frame friendly (hide frame when keyboard invoked, hide/reveal when frame is revealed/hidden)
  • Sugar theme-able
  • Insertion point movement (cursor buttons vs. left/right swipe gesture) This is an important one imho, I have not seen it on any other screen keyboard yet, and looked for it myself several times. On the iPad you can drag the insertion point by its tab to move the insertion point (you will get a magnifier), to pick exactly where you want to add more text. This works in the notes taking app and in Safari. In Android I have seen the same working in the Browser, but not in Polaris Office for example."
  • Subtle keyclick sound effect to provide positive feedback for text entry

Would like to haves

  • Adopt text on keys to current context (go vs search)
  • Additional customisable key/button strips for Activities to provide additional specific features
  • Keys for cut/copy/paste – perhaps toolbar buttons are enough already?
  • Custom keyboard layouts for specialised input needs (url, numeric, emoticon)
  • Predictive text (context sensitive, locale sensitive)
  • Square keys

Recommendation

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