Text input on 3.0, Part 2.

In the last part, we found that we may be able to use the .keyboard format via GetKeyboardDataFromBundle(). This function is only called from -[UIKeyboardLayoutStar setKeyboardName:appearance:], and is not exported, so it seems .keyboard really only contains the keyboard geometry.

To see if it really works, let's save an internal keyboard into a file:

[NSKeyedArchiver archiveRootObject:UIKBGetKeyboardByName(@"iPhone-Portrait-Arabic") toFile:@"/tmp/iPhone-Portrait-Arabic.keyboard"]

unfortunately, UIKBGetKeyboardByName is not an exported symbol, so we have to use nlist or lookup_function_pointers. Now, rename this file to e.g. iPhone-Portrait-QWERTY.keyboard (the English keybaord) and place it to UIKit.framework — and, indeed, the English keyboard becomes Arabic!

But how to create a UIKBKeyboard? A UIKBKeyboard has 3 major components: name (NSString*), visualStyle (NSString*) and keyplanes (NSArray*). The name is just the name you'd expect (iPhone-Portrait-Arabic), while the visualStyle must be one of @"iPhone-Standard" or @"iPhone-Alert". These are easy to construct. The meat are all in the keyplanes variable. The keyplanes is an array of UIKBKeyplane*. Difference keyplanes are switched between using the shift and 123/ABC keys. Again, each keyplane has a name (NSString*, e.g. @"Capital-Letters"); keylayouts, an array of UIKBKeylayout*; attributes, a UIKBAttributeList* and finally supported-types, an array of NSString*, etc., etc...

The content is summarized into http://code.google.com/p/networkpx/wiki/keyboard_file_spec. With the format analyzed, we can try to create our own keyboard using this new format.