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
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.
Hehey I think a lot of people in here are eagerly awaiting what you come up with.
Just a further/clarifying question, though: so are there plans for a mini-QWERTY keyboard?
No firm plans really. It's just the idea I had in my head when I thought about this initially. Whether it gets implemented, well, depends whether we write it - or someone else decides to help contribute it
I will have a look.
I am thinking about gestures (like hit a char, slide up, get the uppercase version, and viceversa; slide left -> delete; slide right -> TAB and so on)
I will have a look.
I am thinking about gestures (like hit a char, slide up, get the uppercase version, and viceversa; slide left -> delete; slide right -> TAB and so on)
Plausible, but I forsee that being a bit difficult with something like T9..
)