This is a follow up on my previous RePhone Keyboard post.
My sim-card cutter arrived, so I chopped my pay-as-you-go sim card and got the phone activated. That process went remarkably smoothly, simply following the instructions provided with the card. I’m using a 711 Speakout card currently, but bought it before their new nano cards were released.
The phone itself as it is is very basic, but does that job just fine. The microphone seems to pick up sound ok, but the audio out seems very quiet by default even at full volume. After confirming the initial phone setup worked, I loaded my first version of the keyboard hack code onto the phone and sadly confirmed that my code didn’t work. 🙁
I tracked down the silly bug and squashed it good, but I noticed that the qwerty-esque layout I choose wasn’t working very well. I also wondered if there wasn’t a more intelligent way for me to implement the keyboard other than 4 separate screens, with all the overhead that requires.
So after a bit of playing around, I refactored the code to implement the keyboard using only a single phone screen. I also thought about the use of the keyboard, and how I could make it more efficient, and I looked to the Dvorak keyboard layout for inspiration. This is the layout I came up with:
Keyboard Layout:
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5
a o e u f g c r v 7 8 9 - _ = + < > ( )
i d h t l q j k z 4 5 6 # $ % @ [ ] \ |
n s p y x b m w ! 1 2 3 & * : ; { } ^ `
. sp , > < ' " > < sp 0 > < / ? > < ~ sp sp
Notes:
sp = space
<, > in purple, on the lower right and left corners, switches between pages.
It seems to work OK so far. I’m trying to minimize page switching, so I’ve put the Dvorak home row on the first page, and gone farther away for each subsequent page, with all the numbers in the normal layout on page 3, and pages 4 and 5 collecting all unused symbols. There’s some extra space at the end I filled with extra space characters.
I could make the keys smaller, perhaps 5×4, but that’s starting to be very hard for my fingers to accurately reach. The 4×4 layout seems to be OK as a compromise. I’m also missing capital letters, but I’m not sure yet how to make them easier to access.
The hacking will continue! Please feel free to drop ideas into the comments. 😉