usability: On-screen keyboard

[phaedrus961]

salival:

As I said, my patch is not really what you're looking for. It was designed to allow the user to create their own layout which works for their screen size and font, instead of having pre-defined layouts. This way, everyone can have only the chars that they need/want and a layout that is intuitive for them. Granted, it's not as pretty as what you're suggesting, but I believe my approach offers the user much more flexibility.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think yours is a bad idea. It's just:
1. Mine should work for most everybody's needs.
2. It's already implemented.

[salival]

Korean and thai layouts added.

These need to be checked and verified. (link)

edit: Greek layout added. Also needs to be verified.
edit2: Russian and Macedonian layouts added. Needs verification

[XavierGr]

I think salival's idea for a unified virtual keyboard is very good, though very hard to implement on current rockbox code.

One major problem is the default font of rockbox. Is this font a unifont?

Will the virtual keayboard be drawed as a (1)"b/w picture" or as (2)"text"?

1. If we are going to display the keyboard as a picture we need many pictures for each language that contain the characters.
-Good thing with the picture idea is that we can make specific bmp files per target and per language. (a lot of pictures though)
-I still don't know though how the user will be able to input those characters, if the default font can't accept those....

2.Displaying the keybard with text is very difficult on this current state. Remember that we are restricted to font selection. We have the default font that is the same for all targets. Making a keybaord with this font is difficult to match all screens. E.g. On archos it will fit fine but then on H300 (or even iPod Video) it won't. It will be tiny.

So unless we change the font system I can't  see how we can make this work. Either we need pictures for each target or we have to load a different font.

Maybe some things are unclear to me but implementing the idea needs major rework on some parts.

[salival]

A text based keyboard has my preference, since that way you only have to define the layouts once. The font has to be the right size offcourse.
As for the font issue: I believe there are patches being developed for multiple font support.

If a bitmap based layout is chosen, sprites could be a solution. That way you only need one (or a few) image(s) for every target. On selection the character color could be inverted.

An other option would be to generate the bitmaps with somthing like the gd graphics library. (that would even be convienient wen using a sprite)

I am no programmer and as such have limited understanding of what is really possible or not. However, most of the things in my proposal are already there in one way or another and only need to be optimised. (multiple/custom layouts for example)

If someone thinks some parts of my proposal could be done easier or better, feel free to add a note or suggestion to the design document.

[salival]

Hebrew layout added, probably incomplete. Needs to be verified and completed.

[salival]

I submitted a feature request as the basics of the document are done, IMO.

That doesn't mean there won't be any changes, but the basics should remain the same. So if there are changes they will be minor. (like character layouts)

[moozooh]

edit2: Russian and Macedonian layouts added. Needs verification

Thanks for the effort. It's very nice of you to care about the cyrillic layouts.

Russian is ok (can't really verify Macedonian), but one thing I think I should say about the symbol layout is that —> ¯ <— symbol isn't used anywhere. On the other hand, some of us (not particularly Russians though) use three different types of dash ("-", "–", "—") that could be present (maybe). However, there are two "-"s that are the same. You could delete "¯" and one of the "-"s, and replace them with "–" & "—". Another symbol I haven't seen used at all is "¨". Should be replaced with the trademark ("™"), maybe? The rest is quite good.

[salival]

The russian character set was re-defined by Andrey Nosich, including adding the symbols.

If you think the symbol layout for russian contains obsolete characters or misses some, feel free to modify it. That way the layouts will be as good and complete as possible.

[NuJew]

Korean and thai layouts added.

These need to be checked and verified. (link)

edit: Greek layout added. Also needs to be verified.
edit2: Russian and Macedonian layouts added. Needs verification

kedmanee is widely used and most popular Thai keyboard, where as pattachote
is rare (mostly old fashioned,

[rastaman01]

One suggestion I had as far as the virtual keyboard on the iPod targets:

It is just too complex to navigate through it... my suggestion would be to:
Use the scrollwheel to navigate left and right, and once the end of line is reached it should move to the next line (instead of using the scrollwheel to go up and down). 

The select button for the 'enter' comand is fine, and I guess the 'backspace' command when the file name is selected I can live with... but it would also be nice to use the << button to as backspace and >> as a forward-space. 

Menu to cancel and >|| to apply/accept work well.

Just a thought...