# Kineboard

_The input method designed for glass._

This is an experimental on-screen keyboard for touchscreens which has very
few touch areas, relying on swipes to type more characters. Each area has a
central character, activated through a tap, and corner characters activated by
swiping in that direction.

It is not natural to have a 6cm-wide simulated typewriter; usually the mobile
keyboards rely on tricks such as autocorrect. Plus, they are not adapted for
other languages; let's take Romanian as an example: we have 5 new letters,
`ăâîșț` and a punctuation mark, the hyphen, which is way more common in Romanian
than in English (because it's used for attachment of some pronouns and also for
contractions). A normal PC keyboard makes them available instead of some
symbols; if the symbols are desired, the extra letters can be moved to an AltGr
layer; with training, this method doesn't slow one down that much.

On a phone keyboard, however, such language adaptation is hard and I haven't
seen a single keyboard that did it with extra keys. Almost all of them use a
hold, which probably shows that they haven't ever had a designer that writes
(correctly) in one of these languages (most Romanian users don't even bother
with the diacritics, not even on PC, unless it's very formal). "ă" is way
more common than "b", "f", "g", "h", "j", "v", "z", not to mention "k", "q",
"w", "x", "y", yet doesn't get its own key like those.

Benefits:

* **impossible to mistype:** since there are only 8 targets (by default), 
  they can be large enough not to miss them; it provides true touch typing
  on a touchscreen;
* **international:** it is adapted to the letter frequency of each language:
  each layout would have the top 8 letters of its language as taps;
* **provides diacritics and punctuation:** compared to the standard mobile
  QWERTY which has at most 28 characters (26 letters + full stop and comma),
  this layout allows for 40;
* **economical use of screen space:** with a surface about 50% smaller than
  a regular phone keyboard, split screens with keyboard become realistic.

Inspiration: mainly
[Unexpected Keyboard](https://f-droid.org/packages/juloo.keyboard2/), but that
is not as radical. I now know of some other keyboards with a similar idea, that
is, not providing all the letters by tapping, but I didn't when I came up with
the concept, and my layout is different, being designed to use as little screen
space as possible.