Saturday, March 21, 2009

3.0 Keyboard Changes


  • The keyboard will now transit (by fading & resizing) between landscape and portrait mode, i.e. the keyboard no longer hides when the orientation is changed (at least in Notes)

  • Emoji got landscape mode

  • Accent view and popup view got less shadows -- I don't like this.

  • When disabling an internal keyboard that was active, the OS no longer reset the whole keyboard list. This means fewer steps to replace internal keyboards by iKeyEx ones. ^_^


I've uploaded a gallery of the extra keyboards and interesting features in 3.0


Some points worth noticing:


  • Even though Arabic and Hebrew are RTL languages Apple doesn't bother to reverse the direction of the delete key. Probably they think it is not very confusing.

  • In Zhuyin, after you entered a consonant in the normal plane, it will automatically switch to the Shift plane for the vowels.

  • In Greek, the final sigma is automatically detected, so you don't see a final sigma on the keyboard.

  • I don't know if they're still using a standard keyboard (i.e. simple subclass of UIKeyboardLayoutRoman) for Thai and Zhuyin as the position of keys in normal plane and Shift plane are distinct. This cannot be done in 2.x at all.

  • Also I don't know if the accents view becoming multi-row is internal or not.


Now excuse me trying to JB the 3.0 and extract the framework binaries...

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