I've been trying to create my own android keyboard following this guide and looking at the latinIME souce code.
While reading the kbd_qwerty.xml file I noticed the different tags used and explained here. I was expecting to see certain tag to reproduce what BetterKeyboard application does. They draw more than one key on each button. Example.
Are they adding images or this is somehow possible from the xml?
Thanks for reading!
Better Keyboard completely rewrote the onscreen keyboard so they can do what every they want with the layout and key functions. With the default Android keyboard you'll need to stick with one glyph per key. Of course you can always use alt's to get other characters.
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I am trying to add some custom keys to the soft keyboard (like a new row of specialized keys on top of the existing keyboard)
I assume the only way would be to get a reference to that keyboard. I know it's possible to get the size of the keyboard (using ViewTreeObserver), but I can't find a way to get the actual keyboard object.
Also, I can add a custom keyboard, but there are a few things that makes everything a bit more complicated, like switching from alphanumeric to special characters and also Shift behaviour. So that's why I'd prefer adding the keys to the existing keyboard, if possible.
Can anyone confirm that's possible? Or that it's not possible?
Thanks a lot!
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.
I am trying to figure out how to make a customized android keyboard. I want additional keys in the keyboard like page up, page down, etc. I want these keys to perform the actions that I want them to do. For example,
http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/hackers-keyboard-is-a-full-5-row-on-screen-keyboard-for-android/
Have a look at the above provided keyboard layouts. How can i do this? Any useful pointers??
Thank you in advance,
Mohsin
You need to create an input method.
Read more about it here, here and here.
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/