So I want to have a keyboard in my app that has emoji just like Whatsapp or Hangouts. How can I do that? I want to leave my key keyboard as it is I just want to add tabs to put emojis. I would think it would be easily supported by the soft keyboard but I can find nothing so far. Anyone could tell how to do it?
UPDATE:
The keyboard with emoji is included in Android KitKat and can be accessed by long pressing the new line button in the keyboard. The Hangouts keyboard however has the emoji icon visible instead of the "new line" key. If someone knows how to make this the default (either in layout or programmatically) I will take that as the correct answer.
As #dbar pointed out, the answer is:
android:inputType="textShortMessage"
But in my case, I was already using textMultiLine, so I had to use the both of them together:
android:inputType="textMultiLine|textShortMessage"
Looks like this:
I'm not sure about the Exact android version, but this should work only on Android 4.1 and above
Finally the answer was:
android:inputType="textShortMessage"
The new line key becomes a key to take out the emoji keyboard. The only quibble is the 'new line' key from the keyboard disappears with this configuration (before you could long press to choose between emoji/new line but now it's only emoji).
In Google Hangout, the emoji button is not on the keyboard (at least on my phone which is already using a third party keyboard), it's inside of the TextEdit box, and so it's part of the application itself (Gabe, I'm talking about the latest Google Hangout on top of KitKat with emoji support, all the current screenshots I found of Google Hangout do not show what I'm seeing on my phone, so this must be a very recent feature).
This is actually pretty easy to do, placing an ImageButton to the right of a TextView inside a RelativeLayout (the RelativeLayout which is made to look like a TextView with a custom background).
Then, it's just a matter of hiding the keyboard when clicking on that ImageButton and replacing it with a panel full of emojis when that happens (like in this open source emoji android keyboard, which is under a creative commons non-commercial license).
There is no functionality to add tabs to any generic keyboard. Certain keyboards may support it, but it isn't a common feature. You could write your own fully custom keyboard, but that's a lot of work and will piss off many users.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean about by like in hangouts. I use hangouts- it doesn't do anything odd with my keyboard. It stays as Swype, there's no special emoji tab. It may be a feature of your favorite keyboard based on the input type (I assume both use input type textShortMessage). But it isn't a generic feature.
Related
I know that you can specify a short message input type in order to turn the enter key of the keyboard into an emoji button and pressing it will show up the emoji list but what i want to do is open up the emoji list programatically from a button. Is this possible?
There is no functionality to add tabs to any generic keyboard. Certain keyboards may support it, but it isn't a common feature. You could write your own fully custom keyboard, but that's a lot of work and will piss off many users.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean about by like in hangouts. I use hangouts- it doesn't do anything odd with my keyboard. It stays as Swype, there's no special emoji tab. It may be a feature of your favorite keyboard based on the input type (I assume both use input type textShortMessage). But it isn't a generic feature.
See Link Android Keyboard with Emoji
Thanks and enjoy...
in my app I disabled the keyboard (I use now my custom keyboard) using this code:
editText.setInputType(InputType.TYPE_NULL);
Now, my problem is that the text cursor does not appear anymore in the edit text. What should I do? Any suggestion would be very appreciated.
There is an Issue opened in bug tracker Issue opened in bug tracker for this.
One of the users suggests the approach which works on "most" devices.
Briefly, all you have to do is call:
editText.setRawInputType(InputType.TYPE_CLASS_TEXT);
for your EditText view (after you called editText.setInputType(InputType.TYPE_NULL);).
You should probably also set:
editText.setTextIsSelectable(true);
in order for text to be selectable (though in does not seem to work properly with Samsung Galaxy SIII). This method is only available starting from HONEYCOMB (api11) so keep that in mind when developing for older Android versions.
Also it is stated that your EditText should not be the first view to receive focus when activity starts (if it is - just requestFocus() from another view). Though I (personally) have not experienced any problems with this.
Rather than just using a custom view for your custom keyboard, why not implement a full-fledged IME? That will solve your cursor problem, and even make your keyboard available outside your app (if you want).
This answer has a couple useful links if you want to do that:
How to develop a soft keyboard for Android?
I really wouldn't suggest this. Writing a good full fledged IME is really hard. In addition, users come to expect functionality from their keyboard (auto-correct, Swyping, next word prediction, the ability to change languages) that you won't have unless you spend months on the keyboard itself. Any app that wouldn't allow me to use Swype would immediately be removed (bias note: I worked on Swype android).
But if you want to integrate fully with the OS as a keyboard, you're going to have to write an InputMethodService. Your keyboard would then be selectable by the user in the keyboard select menu, and usable for any app. That's the only way to get full OS integration, otherwise you'll need to really start from scratch- writing your own EditView. Have fun with that, getting one that looks nice is decidedly non-trivial.
Also, setting input type null won't disable most keyboards. It just puts them into dumb mode and turns off things like prediction.
I tried the below answer and it worked, but take care that
1) EditText must not be focused on initialization
2) when your orientation changes while the user's focus is on the editText, the stock keyboard pops up, which is another "solvable" problem.
This was mentioned in a previous answer but take care that you MUST make sure your editText element do not get focus on instantiation:
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=27609#c7
#7 nyphb...#gmail.com
I have finally found a (for me) working solution to this.
First part (in onCreate):
mText.setInputType(InputType.TYPE_NULL);
if (android.os.Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= 11 /*android.os.Build.VERSION_CODES.HONEYCOMB*/) {
// this fakes the TextView (which actually handles cursor drawing)
// into drawing the cursor even though you've disabled soft input
// with TYPE_NULL
mText.setRawInputType(InputType.TYPE_CLASS_TEXT);
}
In addition, android:textIsSelectable needs to be set to true (or set in onCreate) and the EditText must not be focused on initialization. If your EditText is the first focusable View (which it was in my case), you can work around this by putting this just above it:
<LinearLayout
android:layout_width="0px"
android:layout_height="0px"
android:focusable="true"
android:focusableInTouchMode="true" >
<requestFocus />
</LinearLayout>
I want to add some buttons on top of the soft keyboard (Enter and Cancel). Is there a nice way to do this or do I have to detect the keyboard being shown and add the buttons into my view?
I can't see the logic your trying to apply here.
if you add buttons above your keyboard then you lose some areas in your keyboard (for example you cant press on q w s a).
I think you should look into creating your own custom keyboard.
maybe this will help
android app specific soft keyboard
Jason
You won't be able to do this, and with good reason. If apps could modify an existing input method like this, they could trivially log all keystrokes on your device without you knowing. If you've ever installed a custom input method, you'll see a big warning that using it means trusting it not to log your keystrokes, and the functionality you're after would totally circumvent that protection.
Is there any way to add words to the suggestions in the soft keyboard?
For a specific Edittext field i would like to add a list of names to the suggestions that pops up on top of the soft keyboard in android 2.0.
Does anyone know if this is possible?
Here is the source code of the soft keyboard.
If you go through the code, you will see that it uses a Suggest class which inside has different dictionaries.
If you want to add words for a specific EditText you would need to add and remove or change freq of a certain word from those dictionaries.
Some issues:
I couldn't find a way to get the InputMethodService's instance. (If you can, please answer my question here)
Android allows developers to program their own InputMethodService. I am working on one myself and my implementation doesn't use that dictionaries. So your feature will not work with my IME.
I would suggest using Auto Complete.
You can't add additional words to the ones the IME finds internally, however you can whole-sale supply your own completions via InputMethodManager.displayCompletions():
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/inputmethod/InputMethodManager.html#displayCompletions(android.view.View, android.view.inputmethod.CompletionInfo[])
This is what the auto complete text view uses to show its completions in the IME, when the IME is full screen so it can't be seen. Note that your app is still responsible for showing the completions itself, so they will be available to the user if the IME is not full screen.
(And sorry about the lack of documentation on that method.)
Is there a way to create an app specific soft keyboard on Android? After reading about InputMethodService docs and checking out alternative keyboard apps out there, I figure the alternate keyboard can only be configured for system wide usage (through Settings -> Locale and Text).
If the answer to above question is no, then is there at least a way to load a custom dictionary and override the default dictionary of the system keyboard (only when my app is in use)? That will help in giving very relevant suggestions to the user when he has only tapped couple of keys.
If you just want a View that looks and acts like a soft keyboard, I did that in my SmallKeyboard class. You just need to extend android.inputmethodservice.KeyboardView and decide on layout. See the onKey and onText methods at the end of that file for the action taken when keys are pressed.
Instead of my keyboard model inner class, you could load it from XML if your key set is fairly constant.
The Android Nethack application has a complete and clear source code example of how to create a custom keyboard for an application, how to display it on screen and how to define multiple keyboard layouts. It contains pretty much everything you need to know.
It is by far the best example I have seen.
http://code.google.com/p/nethack-android/