Hi all,

This is an early, crazy, work-in-progress announcement regarding a portrait keyboard for Maemo5 that frals and I are working on in our copious free time. See screenshots below for fun.

Since people keep pointing this out, I'm moving it up here and emphasising it: Worth noting that this is originally written by Nokia, from one of the hildon-input-method examples. We did not write this from scratch.

It is now available from extras-devel, package name is 'portrait-keyboard'.

Known caveats:

• No fast input. Multi-tap to enter a letter, it's slow and *very* painful.
• Changing orientation results in the text you've written so far being lost
• To use it, you'll need to 'killall hildon-input-method' after installing the package (or reboot your n900)
• It's (a bit) painful to use in landscape mode.

Possible future directions (but this is by no means going to happen overnight, these are all quite difficult - feel free to pitch in and help):

• Seperate layout for landscape mode, for easier use
• Fast, predictive input
• Automatic capitalisation

If you're interested in contributing, talk to frals or myself (w00t / w00t_) on #maemo, and see http://gitorious.org/hildon-portrait-keyboard.

Much thanks to Stskeeps and yerga for sending me in the right direction with getting it working, and awesome kudos to frals for getting this in a releasable state.