On Screen Keyboard

On Screen Keyboard: A path forward

The Palm Pre already COMES with an on-screen keyboard. It works in portrait and landscape, in all apps, in all fields.

Press the "sym" key and a scrollable 5x5 keyboard pops up full of alternate characters.

This is controlled by /usr/palm/frameworks/mojo/submissions/191.15/javascripts/widget_charselector.js

with the layout controlled by 3 files in /usr/palm/frameworks/mojo/submissions/191.15/templates/charselector

the actual list of characters that appear on the screen is controlled by /usr/palm/frameworks/mojo/submissions/191.15/resources/en_us/alternatechars_table.json

At the simplest level then, creating an on-screen keyboard requires editing the alternate characters table json, to add the "regular" charcters to it, and then when you want a keyboard, press SYM and poof, a keyboard.

At the next level, widget_charselector.js needs to be modified to not close the keyboard after each keypress.

A more sophisticated version would require editing widget_charselector.js to make the widget wider to accomodate more characters at a time, or perhaps a qwerty layout.

A further refinement would require digging into the mojo framework deeper. It would be really "neat" if you were in a text field and the keyboard "popped up" if the slider was closed. This would be "harder."

Still, this is a path forward which is something we haven't had before.

Please edit this page with your thoughts, and proposals.

Update: 8/03/09 I have been editing widget_charselector.js, and no changes have occurred, on a hunch I deleted the file and everything still runs smoothly. I have concluded that another file must also control the operation of SYM. Please test this, by backing up the file, deleting and rebooting so that we may confirm, we need to find the other file controlling the function. I will continue to search, please post your findings. -Joesmith