I got kind of sad after updating to OTA-9 yesterday. I designed the
keyboard and I agree it might seem random because it's not qwerty but I
put in a lot of effort into improving the Icelandic keyboard which never
really got any love but was a slight modification of the Danish one even
if we have more letters. I might have taken it too far but I just
decided to jump on the chance after I got it.
Here are a few of the changes I wanted and did incorporate:
* I wanted the accented characters like é ý ú í ó and á to be as close to being
"first class citizens" as possible, e.g. é which shares a key with the number 3
means I have to press and hold e and then drag finger to get é instead of just
long pressing (which would normally give me 3). The letter é is used far more
in Icelandic than the number 3.
* I wanted English letters that are not frequently used in Icelandic like q w z
and c to not take up so much screen space. (I ended up grouping them into two
keys). A mobile keyboard is very small and having very infrequently used
characters take up a whopping 4 keys didn't make sense. Instead we had to hide
more frequently used characters like ö and ó behind o.
* I wanted to better fit characters like ð and þ on the keyboard (they look
like an afterthought on the Android keyboard: "Oh no, we forgot þ, let's just
put it here next to the space bar").
* I then wanted to move the most frequent letter in the alphabet "a" to a place
on the keyboard where I don't have to bend my finger very awkwardly to press
it, i.e. "a" should be closer to the middle.
That's when I realised I would have to redesign the keyboard and I
rearranged all keys with the above in mind so I just drew up a keyboard
more aligned with "thumb-typing" than normal finger positioning and the
output was the Icelandic "mobile" keyboard (a mobile dvorak if you'd
like).
I've been using it since it got released last summer and been loving it
(I'm typing faster with less pain in my fingers).
I've showed it off at a few presentations I've given and explained it.
In fact it was a nice anecdote for talks because the only open data
corpus I could get my hands on was speeches from the Icelandic
parliament so the keyboard is actually the most political keyboard in
the word (with word suggestions based on parliamentary speech: I
jokingly say I now call my wife "Esteemed wife").
So I'm sad with this change and it's even worse because the accented
characters like á are not even close to be easy to select on in the
longpress menu.
Would it be possible to resubmit my version as "Icelandic mobile" or
something?
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1522157
Title:
the Icelandic key-board is random
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