usability: On-screen keyboard

[salival]

On Misticriver I started a thread discussing the onscreen keyboards.

Currently there are at least two different layouts, the original rockbox keyboard and the keyboard used in rockword amongst others.

Although these keyboards do what they supposed to do, in my opinion they are not the most optimal solution. In my opinion there should be a single layout for all targets (ofcourse they differ slightly due to screen limitations).

My initial proposal for a layout is as show in the picture hereafter:

(edit: the image appears transformed, click on it to show the original image)

other characters are displayed by using the "sym"(symbols) and "acc" (accents) buttons. Optionally it could be possible to cycle through these character sets by button on the player.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.

edit: wiki page

[Bagder]

Any thoughts on how this would work for our friends that use Korean, Cyrillic, Greek or other non-latin letters?

[salival]

I think this kind of layout could be easily adapted to acccomodate other character sets. If the basic alphabet of such set has more than the current 26 characters an extra row could be added, an extra button to change the set.

So there is definitely room for those languages. Unfortunately I don't know the characteristics of those alphabets.

[salival]

I did some quick search on some alphabets and foud the following list (correct me if i'm wrong):
The text between () is how I think it could be displayed.

arabic: 28 (same as latin, plus two keys next to the spacebar)
cyrillic: 66 (three screens/sets of 22 characters each)
korean: 24 elements (same as latin, consonants and vowels grouped)
hiragana/katakana(japanese): 48 each (two screens each, one button to change between the two sets [hiragana/katakana], there could be an option to write kanji by inputting hiragana)
thai: ~70 (three screens)

[kenshin]

To fully support the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana base characters you need 71 characters in each set. There's an additional 36 each called "glides" where two characters are squashed together to make a single sound. For example, "ki" and "yo" squish together to form "kyo" and this symbol is written differently than "ki" and "yo" separately. You could probably cheat by making the user type in both characters, though. That would leave you with 71 base characters (in both sets) plus 3 glides in each set. Minimum total? 74*2=148.

[pabouk]

Salival thank you for your ideas. I think there is a need for an on-screen keyboard not occupying the whole screen. Here are my thoughts:

Why are there the boxes around the characters? I think they are completely useless and they take a lot of valuable space.

What are the cursor keys for? The cursor can be much easily moved using button combinations (e.g. ON/PLAY + RIGHT on H100s).

What about other useful characters like

Code: [Select]

!@#$%^&*()-_,<.>/?;:' "\|`~[{]}=+
I have an idea for accented characters:
Double press or long press on a letter can show accented variants for the letter. I.e. for "e" it could be é ě è ë ē ė ę ẹ ẻ ẽ ế ề ể ễ ệ etc.

To reduce loading of new unicode characters to the font cache it would be usefull to add an option to restrict available characters. It would be fine if the user could select his preferred ISO charset sets as an unicode subset. For example one could enable ISO 8859-1 + 8859-2 for the on-screen keyboard.

[JdGordon]

i had an idea of a single line at the bottom (or top) of the screen, which is bassiaclly a slider of all available charachters and u use left/right to choose the char and enter to select it...
much simpler and easier to use than the current one...

[Zoide]

I think there could also be Han Zi (Chinese characters), but we'd need something like Pinyin (where you type the romanization and it gives you a list of characters to choose from) and that would probably take a lot of programming...  Has anyone thought about this?

[salival]

Why are there the boxes around the characters? I think they are completely useless and they take a lot of valuable space.

To make it a little more pleasing to the eye. obviously this may be subject to change.

What are the cursor keys for? The cursor can be much easily moved using button combinations (e.g. ON/PLAY + RIGHT on H100s).

Some programs, like rockword and rocalendar use these to navigate around the "paper". So I thought they would come in handy. Another option would be to be able to quickly toggle between the keyboard and paper. That way these keys become obsolete

What about other useful characters like

Code: [Select]

!@#$%^&*()-_,<.>/?;:' "\|`~[{]}=+
I have an idea for accented characters:
Double press or long press on a letter can show accented variants for the letter. I.e. for "e" it could be é ě è ë ē ė ę ẹ ẻ ẽ ế ề ể ễ ệ etc.

Those are located under the "acc" (for accents) and "sym" (symbols) buttons.

Ofcourse my version is only a setup and I intended this thread to come to a widely accepted, easy to use, pleasing to the eye (etc. ) solution.

i had an idea of a single line at the bottom (or top) of the screen, which is bassiaclly a slider of all available charachters and u use left/right to choose the char and enter to select it...
much simpler and easier to use than the current one...

That would mean an awful lot of unnessecary keypresses. IMHO this is only an option to the target where you only have one line available, like remotes.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I played around a little with the japanese layout. As a reference I used the onscreen keyboard which comes with the windows IME. this can use the JIS layout.

(click for the full image)(the characters are less readable because of antialiasing)

[Llorean]

Just as a note:

Rockbox is a music player. The first concern should be ease of use for inputting filenames on any of the music player targets. Rockword isn't even in CVS yet, and should it become so it's still not part of the objective of Rockbox to be a PDA replacement.

Any virtual keyboard ideas should be focused around maintaining as much simplicity and ease of use across all targets, and not increasing the binary size any more than absolutely necessary.

I'm of the opinion that the current vkeyboard doesn't have any serious disadvantages other than the characters being too small for some people on the larger screen or higher resolution targets. I think maybe reconsidering the font choice of those and maybe having a larger font and just showing the subset that the H1x0s show is a better solution.

I think any complicated keyboard ideas should be heavily weighed against the "how much bigger will it make the core on Archos" question, because if it doesn't add functionality (If it *just* looks better, and doesn't significantly increase ease of use) is it really worth sacrificing some of the limited binary size you already have?

[JdGordon]

while i agree... there isnt really anything stopping us useing the current code for archos and new "niceer" stuff for the rest of the players...

[Llorean]

Yeah, there's nothing to stop that. I'm just suggesting that, if a newer one is used for newer players, it should be as similar to the one used for Archos' as possible in button assignments and key layout.

[moozooh]

cyrillic: 66 (three screens/sets of 22 characters each)

Wrong. The language-specific characters are: АБВГДЕЁЖЗИЙКЛМНОПРСТУФХЦЧШЩЪЫЬЭЮЯ (and you may even discard Ё, as it is optional). That sums up to 33 (32 without Ё) characters (66/64 with both regular and capital sets, but they shouldn't be all on the same screen).

[salival]

I took a quick look (with my limited programming knowledge) in to how the current keyboard works. To me it seems the kind of layout I suggested wouldn't be too hard to implement, since there already is support for multiple screens implemented.

The remainder is a matter of generating the characters, some buttons and, for the more graphical players, the optional bitmaps, which should be basic shapes (in the case I presented, squares with rounded corners).

The display of a selected character would IMO a little harder to implement, but inverting the "button" should work.

[kenshin]

After looking closely at the screenshots I think I prefer the Archos layout better than the H1x0 layout. The graphics are just getting in the way.

After looking at the Japanese onscreen IME keyboard you'll have to implement a "shift" button to handle the "glides" I mentioned before. Also, some intelligence will have to be built into the keyboard to make sure a few characters are treated properly. There's 25 characters that use the "double quote" and "circle" to change the meaning of the symbol (i.e. from "ha" to "ba" (double quotes) or from "ha" to "pa" (circle)). I'd be happy to help define any rules for validation and character combinations for Japanese.