Virtual keyboards, and dasher
Based on discussions at the MeeGo Conference, Thomas Thurman has posted a JavaScript mockup of a dasher-based virtual keyboard. Last week at the MeeGo Conference several people were talking about virtual keyboards, and the idea came up of doing predictive text, either by making more likely letters physically larger, or merely by increasing their sensitivity. When I came home, I wrote a JavaScript mock-up based on a third-order Markov chain. It's quite fun to play with, especially on a touchscreen. When I showed this to a few people at Collabora and elsewhere, Rob McQueen suggested avoiding reinventing the wheel by using the rather wonderful Dasher system as a back end. Virtual input is an interesting subject, especially with the numerous formfactors likely to be using the MeeGo platform in the near future, we haven't seen anything particularly new or interesting on a real product since the iPhone launch in 2007.