Odd (but fast) new virtual keyboard, with demo video

**NineByNine** · October 9th, 2009, 02:20

So I did this oddball 'semichordal' keyboard for the PSP. You might have seen it already--there's an implementation in the PSPKVM (J2ME VM for the PSP). It's designed for speed--and honestly, it's not the easiest thing to learn. But once you do, it is pretty fast for a virtual board on the PSP.

A few notes on what it's got/how it works:

Mechanics:

Uses both shoulders and the DPAD as 'chordal keys' to set up what the strike keys (right buttons) do
The chordal system puts 144 distinct raw keystrokes at your fingertips (with no mode-switching, tho' I use that, too, to get still more).
The layouts are based on character frequencies, sort of as is done in a Dvorak or Colemak board (the Latin board is based on English frequencies, Greek on Greek, Cyrillic on Russian)--with the more common characters arranged to be easier to press.
PSPKVM version supports typical rich editing keys--including word left/right, paragraph left, right, top of doc, bottom of doc all with one keystroke.
Along with one click clipboard keys
Very fast for a portable board. I've clocked bursts to 60 wpm. 25-40 wpm is more typical sustained.
Doesn't use the analog stick (tho' you can do cursor control with it in PSPKVM, you don't have to), so you really don't have to move or strain your hands much to move it.

Language support

Supports Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic character input
Supports a large array of diacritics (accents) for all of these, as well as symbols. Diacritics include acute, circumflex, tilde, diaeresis/umlaut, ring, cedilla, breve, macron, stroke, caron, ogonek, middle and high dots. Also supports ligatures.
In short: it has extremely wide language support ... probably supports virtually all European languages using those scripts (tho' has no support for Chinese/Japanese/Korean character input... but then PSPKVM already has a method for that... and Arabic and Hebrew are still to do.

I did it originally to have something a little faster and more practical to use in web forums and in IRC clients online (w/ PSPKVM, you can run Opera Mini and Bolt for the former, jmIRC for the latter), or even to write blog posts, and it is pretty good for this. I also use it now just for jotting notes on the PSP--it's pretty convenient for this.

I don't so much think of it as an 'onscreen' keyboard... It has a mode where it does display its keys, so you can learn it, but I think you're actually better off getting used to it by feel. This is how I seem to do it now... Brain's sorta thinking 'l feels like this, k feels like this', so on...

Anyway, for your interest, there's a demo video at

(... and a Wiki page at http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/psp...michordalBoard)

(ETA: Oh, and you can try it in PSPKVM. There are test builds with the latest version at http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/pspkvm/wiki/TestBuilds.)