The Portrait Keyboard Conundrum
 

Forgive me for bringing up this elephant once again, but hopefully, this could be the definitive thread on the matter....

When I first saw the N900 announced and saw that there was virtually no portrait support and certainly no portrait keyboard I thought to myself, "It's open source, someone will knock something together in a few months". Sure enough, the portrait support for some applications arrived with official updates but then inputting text became an absurd "tilt, type, tilt back" affair.

"Surely now, someone is working on a portrait keyboard," I thought. And they were! And then, they weren't. We had screenshots and testers and demos and then the developers just disappeared.

I am not a developer so I need to know, what are the massive problems in way of creating a coherent, system-wide portrait keyboard? There must be some major difficulty there as this issue is the pink elephant in the room when thinking of the N900. It's the one thing that just throbs away in the background and is never addressed... what can we do?

Ok, there's plenty of people (me included) that are serious in their desire to get the portrait keyboard on the N900 who lack the necessary skills to develop it. I propose that we actively encourage this development by pledging small cash donations to someone wishing to develop it. I say, around $5 each or perhaps even more? With the amount of people I have seen complain or lament the lack of the portrait keyboard, we could have a healthy incentive for a willing developer. What does everyone say? Can we get this drive going to make our beloved N900s just that little bit better?

Re: The Portrait Keyboard Conundrum
 

...and if anyone with the knowledge could let us know whether this is just a pipe-dream due to system constraints, speak up!

Re: The Portrait Keyboard Conundrum
 

Take a look here http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=56220.

I'm working right now to transform it in system keyboard

Re: The Portrait Keyboard Conundrum
 

Please do, this is a great project, and a portrait qwerty is one of the only things making the N900 annoying to use.

Re: The Portrait Keyboard Conundrum
 

Thank you! Thanks to MohammadAG a first prototype is done...I have a lots of work to do now :D

Re: The Portrait Keyboard Conundrum
 

Question: (MohammadAG might be able to answer this if he's watching this thread) Does the keyboard work in the version of hildon-desktop with working system-wide portrait support? I know the main show-stopper on that is the Qt bug in Maemo5 - segfaults when launched in portrait - but if that was fixed upstream, wouldn't that hildon-desktop code allow for system-wide portrait keyboard?

In the meantime, realsportcars, if you can pull off making it work... You reach a new level of awesome for me.

But please, please listen to the users who wish for support for the special symbols and/or letters with accent marks. (I don't know which ones you've implemented, or what you've got planned, I've just heard plenty of users say that they use letters with accent marks a lot, and thus they would be greatly more benefited by your keyboard if those letters were easy to type.)

Re: The Portrait Keyboard Conundrum
 

About symbols and accent, I did my best on qwerty layout, trying to introduce each symbols, but surely something is still missing. If people contact me, telling what's still missing I will be happy to add them!

PS It seems to work in portrait and landscape, but "autorotation" no works

Re: The Portrait Keyboard Conundrum
 

I found an ugly workaround for it if anyone's desperate to start something in portrait mode, don't use maemo5's theming (kinda sucks having to drop themes till this is fixed).

I'm not sure how this keyboard would launch in portrait mode, it probably won't if the window in the foreground is in portrait mode, it happens to all Qt apps.

Re: The Portrait Keyboard Conundrum
 

Brilliant, I hope this keeps momentum. I will donate something upon completion. Enough to buy yourselves a beer, a coffee or perhaps even a luxury chocolate bar!

Re: The Portrait Keyboard Conundrum
 

Me too! I, like James, have no idea how to develop the N900, and rely on you clever people to do it. Portrait qwerty would be a major bonus to an already amazing device. Cheers! :)