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 framework/javascripts/widget_charselector.js

with the layout controlled by 3 files in templates\charselector

the actual list of characters that appear on the screen is controlled by resources\en_us\alternatecharacters_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.