It's really encouraging to see such discussions being brought up. To echo Tim's opinion on [1], I am also in the deep belief that Gaia's Keyboard is one of those which have its merits even as an individual module/library/tool. As webby as it is, people can quickly prototype, develop, and let others try, interesting/innovative (touchscreen) keyboard layouts and IMEs without going through cumbersome deployment processes. I believe this enables developers to experiment with more advanced predictive engines [*] and gather feedback, building from the foundations on what we already have.
[*] such as predicting for agglutinative languages like Hungarian, or context-aware predictions from n-gram models, possibly with a dynamically-fed text corpus. - John [:mnjul] 2016-02-25 0:48 GMT-05:00 Tim Guan-tin Chien <[email protected]>: > Hi all, > > TL;DR: This is a separate "transition plan" for the Gaia Keyboard alone, > attempt to utilize it beyond a FxOS smartphone. Contribution and feedback > welcome. > > === > > With the state of the Firefox OS smartphone project, it is unclear to me > if any future Firefox OS project will continue to be benefited from a > touchscreen keyboard. > > However, it is point out to me in various private conversations that Gaia > Keyboard is valuable in it's own way: > > * It's the easiest free software touchscreen keyboard to contributor -- > all you need is a layout described in JSON and optionally a dictionary, as > documented in [1] > * Thus, the keyboard code base has collected various contributions of > layouts from many languages, some of them are minority languages of the > world with no any other keyboard available. > > [1] > https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/System/Keyboard/IME/Latin/Prediction_%26_Auto_Correction > > == Projects == > > It would be heart broken to throw away all of these we have accomplished. > I therefore would like to call for contribution of these spin-off projects: > > 1. Gaia Keyboard Demo on the Web and a Web library > > URL: https://github.com/timdream/gaia-keyboard-demo > > I've been maintaining this from time to time -- just to make sure people > without a Firefox OS phone and without a build environment could test out > his/her keyboard layout. With suggestion from Prof. Derek Lackaff from Elon > University, I've created a version of it that can be embedded into any > website that wish to offer it's own keyboard [2]. > > [2] Can be tested in http://timdream.org/gaia-keyboard-demo/lib.html > > I would love any contribution on this project to prefect the interaction > needed this usable and pleasant. > > 2. Gaia Keyboard on iOS > > URL: https://github.com/timdream/gaia-keyboard-ios > > I have only hours of Swift experience, and most of them are counted toward > this project. The Web Demo has proven that the Gaia Keyboard can be shimmed > and usable on WebKit/Blink, so it's only reasonable to wrap it in WKWebView > and offer it as a iOS Custom Keyboard. I've also done the part that > re-implements mozInputMethod API and hook it up to TextDocumentProxy > exposed by iOS. The only thing prevented this from working is to figure out > how iOS layout works and make the WebView tappable. > > 3. Gaia Keyboard on Android > > Same as above, but nothing started yet! > > == Implementations == > > All of the above projects runs Gaia Keyboard with code directly from > source tree, with some of the re-implementation of moz- APIs shared. Depend > on # of contributors interested in these projects, it's definitely possible > to dive into the keyboard code itself and not to run Gaia Keyboard as a > whole; but it's important (IMHO, for now) to keep Gaia Keyboard on Gaia > master working as we do this and keep the demo page deploy-able as a GitHub > Pages (no build step and only pull external code with submodules). > > If there are more contributors, I am open to re-implement native UIs in > iOS/Android -- that's definitely possible and a way for us to stop fighting > with the DOM. > > == Fork? == > > Projects above do not keep it's own copy of the Gaia Keyboard. It was done > intentionally so we don't fork the Gaia Keyboard. It's sad to pull 4GB of > data just to work on a directory, but IMHO (for now, again) copy the code > to various projects and try to uplift from the upstream will be harder. > > As Gaia involves (especially when it's necessary from testing/continuous > integration point of view), it might be something needed to work on, but I > would avoid that especially if there isn't enough interest. It would be sad > if people had spent the time build the house but no one come to the party. > > == Productization? == > > To be clear, I do not think Gaia Keyboard alone is a product that would > compete with native, built-in keyboard on other OSes. Gaia Keyboard is > usable in the places where it has the strength, so it's probably not worthy > to plan more features on it. It would also be hard to polish the new > features without support from full time employees in Mozilla Corp. > > As you can see on Bugzilla, we still accept layout and dictionary changes > -- so please submit yours if your language is missing. > > == Conclusion == > > I would like to thank Prof. Lanckaff and Ehsan (CC'd) for the some ideas > around these plans. > > Special shout out to Prof. Kevin Scannell on providing us with word lists > for various languages over the years, which really made a difference > between us and the Android open sourced keyboard. > > Let's get to work -- if you would like to make it happen! > > > Tim > > _______________________________________________ > dev-fxos mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-fxos > >
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