My Android Keyboard: Kinesa Version 72

It’s created in Best’s Board. Reading this introduction, you’ll see why and how is it so greatly personal and suitable for my own personal needs only. So, you don’t want it. You want to create your own one in Best’s Board, don’t you?

My Coat language code now takes 185 kilobytes in 39 files. Now it has 33 layouts. The picture below shows the main layout in one of its states.

The main layout has got 8 rows with 13 buttons on each, what adds up to 103 buttons – one is missing from the bottom right corner because there is my floating back button app (four little buttons to activate the notification bar, the recent apps, the home screen and the back function, respectively), which covers that half button entirely, so there’s no function there.

48 buttons are normal letter keys. Surrounding the space button (empty hexagon with a thickened edge; it’s a Space Travel button of course), there is my Kinesa layout designed in 2006 for Palm PDA’s, optimized for Hungarian by statistical calculations. I’m very well trained to it and I can use it quickly enough, written several novels on it, using Palms first, then Androids. Today I’m using Lisette, the tablet, more than my PC.

Kinesa consists of the hexagonal parts KINESA, CZMTYGDUPORL, VFBJH ÁÉÍÓÚ, ÖÜŐŰ and QWX.
  Near it, comes the Latvian alphabet since I’m learning it for četras years now: ČŽŠ, ĻŅĶĢ and ĀĒĪŪ. And two additional letters ŌȲ for the Sauninas language, featured in Ninda, just because I didn’t find anything better to place there. Update. Two days later, I replaced these two with memory buttons that look like the same and hold the same letters.

Above the letters, there are punctuation marks in about a half of two rows: ’-–,.;?! and ()„”:. They behave differently.
  Apostrophe ’ and hyphen - doesn’t do anything special.
  The comma , semicolon ; colon : closing parenthesis ) and closing quotation mark ” removes any space before them, and appear with a following space. The dot . the question mark ? and the exclamation point ! does the same, and also turns the Autocaps mode on. The opening parenthesis ( and the opening quotation mark „ adds a space before them and no space after. And finally, the en dash – adds a space both before and after it.
  But all of these happen only when the second button in the bottom row is displaying a frog. When touched, it switches to a turtle, and in that case, all punctuation buttons type only the symbol on them, with no Autocaps or Autospace.

Finally, the digits on the upper three rows are also character buttons. The half button with three vertical dots is a thin space character which serves as a thousand separator in Hungarian.
  Additionally, at the right edge, there are two double-character buttons with the symbols // and ** which are two important formatting commands in this blog engine, Vicky (actually, Dokuwiki).

Five of the punctuation buttons are Sticky Buttons as well. So they can serve for 13 purposes each: one when just touched (the punctuation character) and 12 others when the stylus is stroked from them to any of 12 directions, like on the clock face. This means that they are, practically speaking, 65 buttons.
  The two rightmost ones give the basic ASCII punctuation and special characters like and _ and … (the three-dot ellipsis character which I’m using frequently). Yes, you can count 13 around the semicolon: to the 8 o’clock direction, there’s another two-character Vicky command.
  The middle one gives Unicode emojis. Clockwise from 12 o’clock: 🙂 👍 🙁 😂 😥 😍 😗 😛 😮 😎 😀 ❤
  The two leftmost ones are modifiers that can modify letters with diacritics and other things. The ( key, clockwise from 12 hours, yields the acute, grave, caron, circumflex, tilde, overdot, macron, ring, diaeresis and breve diacritics; the blue x symbolizes the stroke modifier to create letters like đłø, and the 11 o’clock one is both the cedilla and the ogonek. The ) key brings less common modifiers: the 12 o’clock one is the Vietnamese diacritics ỏ and ơ, then follows eight diacritics that can be placed below the letters (some of them barely appear on any Unicode character, they are from my own font). At 9 o’clock, there is the upside down modifier for IPA characters, then comes the special modifier for additional IPA characters, and finally, the macron or tilde below.
  Using these two keys, a huge number of characters can be accessed (many outside from Unicode). You can use more than one modifier on a letter, or the same one several times. For example, the ʒ modifier turns a letter n to ŋ then to ɲ etc. Or a letter a followed by the ring modifier makes it å which can be turned by the acute modifier to ǻ. Since the rules are defined by myself, in the same Coat files as the other parts of the keyboard, everything is possible.

There are three clipboard keys, Paste, Copy and Cut, on the left edge. They use the normal Android system clipboard, but when (for most of the time) I’m using Jota, it features an advanced clipboard which automatically remembers several strings recently copied.

The Caps key is the upwards-pointing white arrow decorated with blue and red stripes, right from the semicolon button. It has four states, shown by its background color:
  black – no caps, lowercase letters
  dark yellow – autocaps, next character is uppercase
  green – caps, next character is uppercase
  red – caps lock, following characters are all uppercase
  Tapping on the key cycles black, green and red. Dark yellow is activated only by sentence-final punctuation marks (dot . question mark ? and exclamation point !) and Enter.

Right from the Caps key, there is a green four-pointed star with decorating yellow dots. This is the joystick. Tapping on the key doesn’t do anything, but if I put the stylus on it and begin moving the stylus around, the cursor will move around in the editor. The yellow arrows denote that diagonal directions up-left and up-right make the cursor jump a word left or right, respectively. The blue arrow is for the Caps Toggle function: stroking down-left from the joystick makes a word cycling three cases Cases CASES.
  (The down-right direction is yet unused.)

There are two red arrows with x crosses. They are the Backspace (left arrow) and the Delete (right arrow) keys. Both are repeating when kept pressed.

Best’s Board has the functionality to change the appearance of the Enter key according to the situation: it can be a Go key, a Search key and others. I’m not using this, the key is always displaying a bent arrow. Rainbow-colored, to be visually attractive.

Above and below the Enter key, there are two yellow double-headed arrows with letters P. These are the Paragraph Up and Down keys. The Up key jumps to the beginning of the current paragraph, then to the previous one and so on. The Down key works the same way, but at the end of the paragraphs. They repeat when kept pressed.

Now we have 14 memory keys on this layout alone. 9 in the top row, two above and below the sun, and three in the bottom right corner (these ones are wearing the characters ů, ⇓ and ḩ on the screenshot). A memory key is a character or string key programmable without touching the source code. Pressing a memory key which bears MEM will change it to SEL on a red background. Pressing it again will place the selected text (or if nothing is selected, the word at the cursor) on the button. Only the first five characters will be displayed, but the complete text is typed when pressing the button. To redefine it later, I just need to draw a circle on the key to switch it to SEL mode again.
  But the 14 memory keys are actually 59 (6 · 9 + 5). The two buttons left and right to the sun which are only partly visible are switches: they’re paging through six sets of the nine memory keys on the top row. The small dot left to the sun is changing color according to the set: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan and blue. This is the newest development at the writing of this article.

The sun and the ZX Spectrum rainbow stripes are merely for decoration. The sun is an emoji, I’m changing it at random times; the idea was taken before Christmas and the first one was a Santa Claus. The rainbow stripes are actually large slash / characters.

The bottom left corner has a keyboard icon: this brings up the layout menu.

The menu is a bit messy, but I don’t spend much time in it. Choosing a red layout button leads to that layout.
  The Set button goes to the Settings menu of Best’s Board. The Reload button reloads the Coat files after a modification.
  The red layout buttons in order:
  Ļ – the main layout (described above)
  📒 – the memory layout
  € – the symbols layout
  ⁘ – the U+2000 layout*
  colored hexagons – the colors layout
  colored stripes – the flags layout
  Θ – the Greek layout
  Я – the Cyrillic layout
  ॐ – the Devanagari layout*
  Ա – the Armenian layout
  א – the Hebrew layout*
  ބ – the Thaana layout*
  ɮ – the phonetics layout*
  😀🎂🐸🔥🗑🚑🤐🦄♿ – emoji layouts*
  இ – the Tamil layout*
  ණ – the Sinhala layout*
  € – the U+2070 layout* (yes, an euro symbol again)
  And three experimental layouts as attempts to create other language keyboards:
  E – Esperanto
  V – Vietnamese
  Liv – Livonian–Baltic

Layouts marked with an asterisk * aren’t more than results of a little program I wrote: it takes a part of the Unicode table and makes it into a layout, only adding a key with an arrow ↖ in the last row to provide a way to return to the main layout. No additional editing was made, so, even undefined characters were removed only at some places where there were many of them.
  I make very limited use of the Greek and the Cyrillic layouts, speaking no language that would need them; they’re mostly used for phonetic and linguistic purposes. As for the other language layouts, I’m not using them at all, they were added just for fun, “why not?” and they were also chosen on this basis as well.

NB. There is no CJK on this keyboard. There is a Cāngjié conversion table implemented, and I had a button for it for a long while (it was very simple, I typed one to five letters, pressed the Cāngjié button, and the letters were turned into a character) but I removed it because the conversion table was huge and made each reloading an age. For Japanese, adding a Kana layout is very simple, but we have no Kana to Kanji conversion table yet. And for Korean, a Jamo to Hangul table would be required. But I speak neither language so don’t need them.

This layout is nothing more than a collection of 60 memory buttons. I’m using it for Ninda, where there is a lot of Syndorian names, using an unrememberable orthography even for myself, so the most frequent words are kept on these buttons.

This collects some ASCII and other symbols and arrows. It’s just a selection. Complete arrow and math layouts are planned.
  The layout contains four diacritic modifiers I didn’t find a place for on the main layout.

What makes this one visually attractive is not my invention, this is a Visibone color table turned into buttons. Each button gives a 1 to 3 letters code that can be used in both Vicky and Coat. For example, the key marked pale dull red types pdr which, when used in the appropriate command, results in a pale dull red color.

This layout looks like a simple QWERTY keyboard, but these letters are actually from the Unicode Regional Symbols. Typing two of them displays a flag: GB → 🇬🇧.

Yes, once upon a time there was a Caps button on it, too, just it disappeared upon a recent modification. Other things are also missing, like punctuation, but the way I need it this is enough: to type phonetic IPA transcriptions that include Greek letters, and sometimes a Greek word or two. So, the alphabet and two sets of diacritics: two buttons for New Greek and six for Ancient Greek.

As it’s very obvious, this layout was created by replacing the letters on a previous version of the main layout. It has the letters for Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian and Macedonian, and six modifier keys to reach additional letters.

This is very simple as well, also lacking the Caps button.

As mentioned above, these ones are simply the results of a program that copies Unicode tables on layouts.

This was based on a totally wrong idea. I planned to write each Vietnamese syllable by downwards strokes, from the initial consonant, through the vowel, to the final consonant. But there were so many things not thought well that I left it unfinished, even didn’t add any tonal mark.

I wanted a dedicated Livonian keyboard, so added its letters to this layout. And added Latvian, since Livonian is an extinct language of Latvia, and Livonian speakers are native Latvians. Adding Lithuanian, Estonian and Polish turned it into a Baltic layout. Of course, the same could be achieved by a few modifier keys (all of these letters can be obtained on the main layout, too), but here I wanted a different approach.

I’ve increased the number of buttons per row, being satisfied with smaller buttons. Now I have 15 in every odd row, 14 in every even row, and there’s four of both, so 4×15+4×14=116 places, of which two are covered by the decoration – actually, the one right to button è would be simply usable if I didn’t want the decoration, and the half button right to button ḩ would be also usable if the toolbar of the Back Button app wasn’t be there. But 114 buttons on the main layout is a good number. And now we have six sticky buttons with 12 additional characters on it, plus the joystick button has 7 functions, so, we can count with, actually, 114+6×12+7=193 functions.
  The following changes were made:

• The layout is now 28 half columns wide, and thus I have 27 memory buttons:
  • 10 fixed ones, on the screenshot, titled ÀLAN, Ḱïyṙe, ō, ȳ, ẅ, õ, è, ò, ḩ, à
  • 17 paging ones: 11 on the top row, rainbow colored, and on the upper right part, three titled MEM and those titled ≅, ń, ṙ
• the hair space button (titled ⁝) is moved down to the fourth row and became a sticky button with characters €©^~·×÷●°²³
• the Caps button was redesigned to wear red, yellow and green traffic lights inside the arrow, since it can be painted red, yellow or green itself

Being there six sets of the 17 paging buttons, this counts as 102 buttons alone. To add it to the number previously calculated, we add 193+5×17 since one set of them was already accounted for, so, it’s 278 functions on the main layout alone.

And this brings up the thought: what if I make the main central part also changeable, with another set of paging buttons? This can give way to other scripts, 46 buttons are enough for Cyrillic (my layout has now got 50 letters and 6 modifiers, so if one button becomes a sticky one it’s more than enough) or even Arabic (28 letters and some punctuation).
  The only problem with that is if I want to keep the paging memory buttons, it means I need a separate layout for each combination of a language layout and a memory bank. So, six memory banks with, say, four language layouts means 24 layouts, and each one must be furnitured separately. But well, I’m great in text processing.

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