I am building a tablet and I really don't want to use the standard keyboard input. I am always in landscape mode so I don't think I have enough space for the way this keyboard works. Is there any good tutorials on creating ones own custom IME? Is the resize an option for landscape mode?
Related
In a website I'm designing, I'm using the following layout to ask for a user's phone number:
This is fine on portrait orientation. However, on landscape orientation, at least with Android, I'm getting this:
I can save some space by maybe hiding the navigation bar, tweaking some pixels here and there, but still, this appears to be a sub-optimal user experience. I looked into orientation locking, but this works only for full-screen applications, or websites that have been added to the homescreen. Is there another way to prevent the keyboard from taking up more than 80% of the screen?
I think this is normal , the main issue is your mobile have a small screen
That's pretty much sums up the question. I have an AIR Mobile Flex App project in FlashDevelop that is using views to show content. Everything works fine, I can add a TextInput or TextArea to the stage, select it (Soft Keyboard shows up then), type some text. But when I press enter or change focus to the other element to hide the keyboard, the screen turns completely white except for the text that has been entered in the field.
Now it becomes interesting. If I rotate my tablet to force the screen to adjust, the content becomes again visible. Sometimes it doesn't even show a white screen, but rather a pitch black one that shows a blank preview when looking at the list of the running apps.
I cannot grasp the logic besides this behavior. It seems that somehow screen just doesn't want to redraw.
UPD:
AIR verison: 3.1
Tested on HYUNDAI SmartPad H-SP701G, Android 4.0.4
UPD2:
Tested on SANSUI ETAB 801VP, still getting the same effect.
The problem is in your application configuration XML.
Check your tag.
Entering value of "auto" or "cpu" should fix the problem.
<renderMode>auto</renderMode>
In my case I set direct and this was the cause of the issue. Using direct render mode caused the application to not work on HTC Evo 3D and Samsung galaxy s3. It did work on HTC Desire though.
Is there any way I can force soft keyboard to appear in full screen mode, so that there are only 2 items on the screen:
Text content
Keyboard
?
Android 2.3
I think you are looking for fullscreen or extract mode
Link to Android documentation
EDIT I forgot to mention this
The final major mode is fullscreen or extract mode. This is used when
the IME is too large to reasonably share space with the underlying
application. With the standard IMEs, you will only encounter this
situation when the screen is in a landscape orientation, although
other IMEs are free to use it whenever they desire
As I understand there's no way to do such a thing so that it works consistently across all devices and soft keyboards (well, unless you implement your own but I think this would be very out of scope)
I'm using the Android emulator to test my first Android application. While there is a functioning hard keyboard at the right side of the emulator window, the soft keyboard shows up when editing in an EditText control.
I'm aware of the option to hide the soft keyboard by using an instance of InputMethodManager, however I'm wondering why the soft keyboard does appear at all (when the hard keyboard is available).
To me, as a user, the soft keyboard in this case is rather distracting, hence I'd like to get rid of it if useful. - This question is about the practical context (i.e., is there any use of the soft keyboard when there is a hard keyboard, do real-world devices behave similarly to the emulator) and about general strategies to address the issue.
Thanks. I'll be upvoting any helpful hints.
On my G1, when the hard keyboard was opened, the soft keyboard didn't appear. But I'm not sure whether a device which ALWAYS has a keyboard opened (like the Samsung Galaxy PRO if I'm not mistaken) does the same.
Since the emulator doesn't have a slide keyboard, I think that's the case for this behavior.
With a touch screen device + hard keyboard you have the flexibility to use both. On most devices with hard keyboards the keyboard has to be dragged out. It's much easier to just tap the screen. If you want to type a lot you would take the trouble to slide the keyboard out.
Android gives you the flexibility to program for all these behaviors.
Actually, the AVD emulator does have a slide-out keyboard.
The AVD option "Keyboard support" indicates whether the emulated device has any form of physical keyboard. The option "Keyboard lid support" indicates whether the device has a keyboard that can be opened or closed (slid out or what have you).
As far as actually "opening" and "closing" the keyboard on a device set up with these options,
you need to switch the orientation which is generally what you do with real-world slide-out-keyboard phones, e.g. the original Droid:
Original Droid with slide-out keyboard open
In the emulator, you control this orientation change with Ctrl+F11/Ctrl+F12 or 7/9 (on the number pad only, with NumLk off).
You can confirm the keyboard opening and closing states by checking the value getResources().getConfiguration().hardKeyboardHidden == config.HARDKEYBOARDHIDDEN_YES
As far as whether the soft keyboard appears or not, it appears to me that handling such things is up to you as the programmer. Here's an example you can try in AVD:
Set up an emulator with "Keyboard support" and "Keyboard lid support" both set to yes.
Launch the emulator, then open Android's built in Messaging app.
Click in one of the text boxes - the soft keyboard should show up.
Switch the orientation of the emulator with Ctrl+F12 - the soft keyboard should now disappear
Note there seems to be a problem with the emulator itself, that switching back to portrait mode doesn't cause apps to redraw themselves back to portrait layout. but they will switch back to closed keyboard mode, which yields some odd, sideways-y behavior.
For an example of code to catch the keyboard opening/closing events, check out: http://www.how-to-develop-android-apps.com/how-to-detect-screen-orientation-change-in-android/
After testing on real world devices; On the motorola milestone that has a sliding keyboard that if it's open the soft keyboard is not shown, but when it's closed the soft keyboard is shown. On the HTC Cha-Cha, that has a permanently shown keyboard, the phone always uses the hardware keyboard. Even when in landscape and the hard keyboard would be very difficult to use it doesn't show a soft keyboard (Even after installing a soft keyboard I was unable to select it for use under Keyboard & Language Settings).
For additional information about the phone you can use the following.They will return the keyboard type and whether or not it is a hard keyboard and shown. Note: Phones without a hard keyboard that I've tested report that hardKeyboardHidden=2; (Which indicates hidden=yes), but type reports as soft keyboard which makes sense.
Configuration config = getContext().getResources().getConfiguration();
int keyboardHidden=config.hardKeyboardHidden;
int keyboard=config.keyboard;
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/res/Configuration.html#HARDKEYBOARDHIDDEN_NO
I am developing an Android application. What I find most annoying during testing is, that the emulator always pops up that on-screen telephone keyboard whenever I click into a text input field. Since I input my data with the keyboard anyway I find that most annoying. Can one switch that on-screen keyboard appearance off? Or can one change that so that it at least presents a mini-qwerty keyboard as my actual device does, not that old-fashioned T9 keyboard?
Michael
You can disable the virtual keyboard in Settings->Language.
If you change orientation of the emulator it won't popup (KEYPAD_7, Ctrl-F11).
If you use cursor keys instead of clicking the fields, probably won't popup either.
Whatever you do, keep in mind that in actual devices it usually pops up anyway.