KeyCaps type of app needed!

[(G)]

On the Palm platform there was an app called "Key Caps." What it did was allow you to quickly hit a key twice in succession and it would generate a capital letter (hit "g" twice quickly on the keyboard and it would turn it into a capital G" or if you held down the key for a second, it would generate the ALT symbol associated with that key (a "%" for the "g" in this case).

The prefs menu allowed you to switch those (i.e. double-tap and get the ALT, hold down long and get the capital).

Any chance of doing something like that?

 

[sorceror]

I'm a developer, though not of Android apps (yet). I'm planning on getting a Droid in the next few days, though. I, too, am a big fan of KeyCaps on my Treo, and would love to have such functionality on the Droid.

I've developed for countless flavors of Unix, PalmOS, Windows, Netware, and so forth. I even got some code into the Linux kernel. I'm reasonably sure I could handle this job, but I'm not sure where to start. Anyone here want to advise me?

Just from a quick skim, it looks like I could implement an android.inputmethodservice.KeyboardView.OnKeyboardActionListener and tweak the input stream it produces. Of course, I'm not sure how to register one, and so forth... any hints? Or suggestions for a better approach?

 

[garyg-1]

It sounds like the right sort of place to begin. I've done a bit of keyboard munging, but never in a high-level language. At the native instruction set level you need to be able to capture "key down", "key up", "which key", a "clock", and have some place to keep tables of replacement values. I have implemented several table-driven State Machines for keyboard re-interpretation: State Machines consume more static memory, but have very low CPU costs to run and are easy to debug & tweak. Please keep us posted on your progress.