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Multitouch Keyboard

Are there any multi touch keyboard apps or can this even be done?

hmarcus said:
Are there any multi touch keyboard apps or can this even be done?
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Despite what you may have heard, multi-touch IS available on Android 2.x out of the box. It is just turned off on built-in apps in the US and this includes the keyboard, Maps, Gmail, Browser, etc. There are two ways to get a multi-touch keyboard. Either someone develops one (if it hasn't already been done, I've never checked) or we way for a ROM to be developed and have the dev enable MT in the ROM, as well as the keyboard.

I'm starting to see a bunch of multi touch apps in the market mainly drawing apps and there are a bunch of gallery apps too. Multi touch keyboard is needed very badly I hope we can get one soon.

Technically, the keyboard is already multitouch. You can see this by holding down a key and pressing another key. The instant you press the second key, it triggers the first. You can compare this behavior with the pre-2.0 behavior where it would simply act like you had a single finger on the key in the middle of your two fingers. It might not quite be as nice as the iPhone's implementation(you can't hold down shift and press a letter), but it is multitouch.

Smart Keyboard is supposedly multi-touch, but it's a rather infant app...

The stock Android Keyboard is multitouch enabled. I don't get why people think it's not. It only shows the large letter under the first finger, but that's by design... let me explain:
Press 'A' with your left thumb, then 'P' with your right. You'll only see the large 'A' under your thumb, and 'P' will look unpressed. If you release 'A' now, however, it will be typed, and the large 'P' will now appear under your right thumb. But if you release 'P' under your right thumb first, it won't be typed if you're still holding 'A'. The reason is, if you press one key, and then press and release a second so quickly that you still haven't released the first, then this is probably not an intentional tap of a letter, but an accidental brush of the screen, and it is ignored. Letters are always typed in the order you touched them, otherwise typing would be much harder at high speed. The second touch is recognized, but you don't see it until you release the first touch, because if you release the second touch before the first, it will be ignored. So type at high speed, with two thumbs at a time, and the keyboard will 'just work' and keep up. Trust me.

the dolphin browser lets you use the iphone zooming method. european N1's will have this ability anyways (I guess) since its not protected by a patent (illegal to patent such a development).

carnegie0107 said:
The stock Android Keyboard is multitouch enabled. I don't get why people think it's not. It only shows the large letter under the first finger, but that's by design... let me explain:
Press 'A' with your left thumb, then 'P' with your right. You'll only see the large 'A' under your thumb, and 'P' will look unpressed. If you release 'A' now, however, it will be typed, and the large 'P' will now appear under your right thumb. But if you release 'P' under your right thumb first, it won't be typed if you're still holding 'A'. The reason is, if you press one key, and then press and release a second so quickly that you still haven't released the first, then this is probably not an intentional tap of a letter, but an accidental brush of the screen, and it is ignored. Letters are always typed in the order you touched them, otherwise typing would be much harder at high speed. The second touch is recognized, but you don't see it until you release the first touch, because if you release the second touch before the first, it will be ignored. So type at high speed, with two thumbs at a time, and the keyboard will 'just work' and keep up. Trust me.
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Right, but that leaves you with no ability to say, hold down **** and push a letter to capitalize. What people want is for both keys to register when you are holding two keys down, in the order that you pressed them.

hondamx525 said:
Right, but that leaves you with no ability to say, hold down **** and push a letter to capitalize. What people want is for both keys to register when you are holding two keys down, in the order that you pressed them.
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Why do you need to hold down shift? Taping shift once does the same thing as holding ****, think of it was "sticky keys" if you're from a windows machine. Theres never a need to hold the shift button. Double tap it for capslock if you really need caps

严重鄙视标题党！我代表月亮惩罚你！

callant said:
严重鄙视标题党！我代表月亮惩罚你！
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you win the game

hondamx525 said:
Right, but that leaves you with no ability to say, hold down **** and push a letter to capitalize. What people want is for both keys to register when you are holding two keys down, in the order that you pressed them.
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I agree with this guy. I don't know what the other guy is talking about. The letters don't queue. I have trouble typing fast because every other letter doesn't register.
so silly to have disabled such a useful funtion, only to most likely enable it at a later date, or at least we would hope.

Usefull app request - T9 Touch type app

I used to touch type on old candy bar and slide phones without having to look at the screen, by feeling the dialpad keys I knew what button I was on and using the T9 dictionary it was easy, I really miss this in new phones now.
I wanted to buy a dialpad phone with Android as a 2nd phone but there are none being made so I think they are going the way of the dodo.
There is no feesable way to touch type on new phones, qwerty keyboards have too many keys, haptic feedback is in its infancy, so I propose a full screen T9 keyboard for touch typing.
The whole display would be filled with 9 or 10 buttons representing 0-9 like a standard dialpad.
This wouldn't be the main input method, I think it would be good for it to activate by pressing the volume down button twice while in a text field and deactivate by doing the same thing. Hopefully it should be possible to touch type without haptic feedback when the whole screen is filled with only 9 buttons.
Let me know what you guys think.

why the full screen??? my htc hero has softkb with t9, fills half the screen. I never use qwerty. Works like a charm. you can get the htc_ime.apk and use that.

I havent heard of anyone being able to touch type on a touchscreen phone yet, ie writing an sms while driving without looking at their phone.
If it is literally filling the whole screen it may be possible on a 3.7" screen the buttons will be big, you are either pressing one of the corners, middle or sides.
If it is filling only half the screen it becomes a lot more difficult if not impossible.

Keyboard Accuracy Problem

Hi
I've been using HD2's Default Keyboard and Compact Keyboard and find it annoying with it's accuracy problem, but I have a idea that make it more accurate but a little of typing speed sacrefice
my idea is dynamic button domain, it means that when a letter on the soft keyboard is pressed, it's press domain expands so if the finger ( thumb most of the times ) moves a little to other sides, the letter does not change by that little move that is natural.
for example, when you want to press letter "D", you press it but because you pressed it by thumb, the thumb by a little move can go on to S, F, E, R or X that make the mistake. but with this idea, when "D" is pressed, it's activate domain area of "D" expands and by a little move of the thumb, no problem will be made.
I want to share this idea for if a programmer for win mo read it and found it interesting, code it and make a keyboard that is beautiful like HTC's and functional.
thanks
PS: I used BsB Tweak 1.6 for reducing screen sens and increased the tap time, but it's not still good

+1
ive had the same prob. it happens a lot when i play around with my dog. i wonder if the static causes some prob or anything. i dont know.

Just "type" and do not look at the keyboard, which works very fine Just hit it for a short moment and you shouldn't suffer from that problem

How edit in middle of sentence or place cursor there?

I've tried 2-3 different keyboards, and I cannot figure out how to select a word from the middle of sentence, or place the cursor there if I need to. For example in this short paragraph, if I need to click after the word and above, I just can't figure out how to do it.
Feelin' kinda dense

Most phones have a dpad, but since the Captivate doesn't it's a little harder. On the Swype keyboard, you can swipe from the Swype key (the little squiggle with the i on top) to the "sym" key.
That opens up another page of keys with arrow buttons on it. Android really needs to do something about text input soon, it can be a pain.

Use your finger to tap on the screen.

Of course that's the first thing I tried. Maybe I just need to lear to have the touch.

[Q] got any pro tips for selecting text?

I find selecting and copying text very difficult.
For example, from calendar. Which by the way I have to "edit" because you can't dial a phone number from a calendar. ( Seriously google are you just kidding around with that by the way? )
Mainly the selecting part.
I find this impossible to do easily, takes multiple tries because of not getting the cursor positions right, and I don't think it's just me.
Here is my workflow. Can anyone see what I am doing wrong?
1. First, the keyboard takes up half the screen so now I'm left with only about 5 lines of text so I have to scroll around the meeting text entry to field to find the text I want to select. ( If I hide the keyboard with downswipe or other method it does not come back! )
2. When you find the text you want say a phone number 1-752-555-5234 I try to touch immediately before the 1, but as soon as I touch the screen, the entire field scrolls to the bottom.
3. Now I have to repeat step 1
4. I seem to have to do steps 1 to 3 twice for some reason (not kidding) it does not seem to give me the vertical cursor hairline (calling it a hairs width thickness is being generous ) the first time.
5. Now, I will have the cursor correctly at 1. Because if I am one digit off, I have to repeat steps 1 through 4 until I get it correctly positioned.
6. Now, long press on screen, choose select text.
7. Now repeat steps 1, 3 and 4 (skipping 2) until get the cursor at the correct ending position.
8. Once this is done, which for me can take up to several minutes to do, I can easily copy and paste the text.
If you've used an iPhone or even Windows Mobile 6.x you know how hard it is to understand that google failed so miserably at this.

bwolmarans said:
I find selecting and copying text very difficult.
For example, from calendar. Which by the way I have to "edit" because you can't dial a phone number from a calendar. ( Seriously google are you just kidding around with that by the way? )
Mainly the selecting part.
I find this impossible to do easily, takes multiple tries because of not getting the cursor positions right, and I don't think it's just me.
Here is my workflow. Can anyone see what I am doing wrong?
1. First, the keyboard takes up half the screen so now I'm left with only about 5 lines of text so I have to scroll around the meeting text entry to field to find the text I want to select. ( If I hide the keyboard with downswipe or other method it does not come back! )
2. When you find the text you want say a phone number 1-752-555-5234 I try to touch immediately before the 1, but as soon as I touch the screen, the entire field scrolls to the bottom.
3. Now I have to repeat step 1
4. I seem to have to do steps 1 to 3 twice for some reason (not kidding) it does not seem to give me the vertical cursor hairline (calling it a hairs width thickness is being generous ) the first time.
5. Now, I will have the cursor correctly at 1. Because if I am one digit off, I have to repeat steps 1 through 4 until I get it correctly positioned.
6. Now, long press on screen, choose select text.
7. Now repeat steps 1, 3 and 4 (skipping 2) until get the cursor at the correct ending position.
8. Once this is done, which for me can take up to several minutes to do, I can easily copy and paste the text.
If you've used an iPhone or even Windows Mobile 6.x you know how hard it is to understand that google failed so miserably at this.
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While I admit copying/pasting does not seem particularly easy on our phones, the Calendar app we have is NOT the stock Android one so you should actually aim your criticism at Samsung. Same with the Messaging app (Samsung's work, not Google's). I'm slightly more used to the iPhone long press technique and it's magnifying glass technique, but I'm sure it's something they'll (they being Samsung) will attempt to improve

if you are using the Samsung keboard. Long press the 123? key, that will take you to an editing menu.

cesierra said:
if you are using the Samsung keboard. Long press the 123? key, that will take you to an editing menu.
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This works on the swype keyboard as well; swipe your finger to the right from the info button to the SYM button and it brings up a selection keyboard. Very useful
-deuX`

cesierra said:
if you are using the Samsung keboard. Long press the 123? key, that will take you to an editing menu.
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And your point is? Have you ever tried selecting test with that? Clearly not.
EDIT: My Bad. THANK YOU, Cesierra.
With a little practice that works great. For those who are curious, it works. It positions the cursor start position at the bottom of the calendar entry. From there you can up-arrow to position the cursor exactly where you want, then selection is easy. A very good kludge as kludges go, I am impressed.

you are welcome

Thank you cesierra/deuX!

I learned something new here.
I really like it when someones first post is a helpful one

deuX` said:
This works on the swype keyboard as well; swipe your finger to the right from the info button to the SYM button and it brings up a selection keyboard. Very useful
-deuX`
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Cool thanks for sharing... never knew that!