Brainstorm

Easier way of typing accentuated characters

Posted on 2010-01-15 17:24 UTC by Clément Vasken Labadie. Status: Under consideration, Categories: User Experience.

Typing accentuated characters in Maemo is not the easiest nor the fastest action to perform. This is certainly not a huge issue for english speakers, but it may be for others.

Simple example : we french people love to put accents everywhere, because it's sooo much fun! :p
If you want to type the word "été" (french for summer), you have to type the following sequence :

Fn + Sym + accent + e + t + Fn + Sym + accent + e

That's a lot of keystrokes for a 3-letter word!

As many other languages make use of accentuated characters (i.e. German), improvement in this area would be much welcomed :)

Talk forum link : http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=474501

Solutions for this brainstorm

Solution #1: Extended Sym menu

Posted on 2010-01-15 17:24 UTC by Clément Vasken Labadie.

One solution would consist in an extended "Sym" menu, featuring the possibility of typing characters like é, à, ö, î etc. directly from that screen, without having to select the accent and then type the desired letter on the keyboard.

Solution #2: Long-press letter

Posted on 2010-01-15 17:36 UTC by Clément Vasken Labadie.

One other solution would consist in long-pressing the letter that you want to accentuate. i.e., if you long press the "e" letter, you'd have a menu (similar to the sym menu) allowing you to chose é, è, ê, ë... Same things for other letters (long pressing "s" would display ß etc.). Something similar has already been asked for, enabling long-press to actually type the blue character corresponding to the key. That's an idea anyway!

Solution #3: repeat press before time out cycles all the accentuations for that character

Posted on 2010-08-11 01:46 UTC by Tiago Estill de Noronha.

It would work similarly to how it is on a regular mobile dialpad, you can get different chars for a same given key, you press once and it outputs the default character for the key, if you press it again in a short period of time it will replace the outputed character with the next char for that key, you can repeat this as many times as you need to reach the char you're looking for, if you wait long enough then it will "reset" and if you press that same key now it will output a new char, same thing if you press the right arrow key.

For example, the A key would cycle between A, Ã, Á, Ä etc , perhaps even include the Fn character for that key in the cycle as well.

Perhaps it would be good to have an option to remember the state of the shift key/capslock when the key was pressed the first time, so you don't have to keep holding it to get capitalisation in the other characters int he cycle.

Pros

Familiar interface paradigm

Can be done without switching between physical keyboard and touchscree

No key combinations required to reach any char

Cons

Longer delay or aditional keypress required for typing repeated characters or characters sharing the same key

Some characters might require many keypress to be reached

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created brainstorm Easier way of typing accentuated characters

2013-04-30 03:17 UTC

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