Hey all,
Just a little note- I've had some luck using my bluetooth Keyboard with my Nokia N800 and Squeak. I mention this specifically because with a keyboard, the Nokia N800/770 makes a cool little laptop- I'm building a simple laptopish case out of cardboard and because teh Maemo platform the Nokias run on is a bit funky with regards to input- e.g. unlike on CE, you don't have access to the OS-level software keyboard, etc to input into Squeak, and as such we've relied on Genie or soft-keyboards inside Squeak to input text. Since the KB doesn't support the HID profile, you have to use a driver.
Driver: http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/ Keyboard I'm using: http://www.freedominput.com/site/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=28
The keyboard I'm using, but which uses the standard HID profile, which is a better way of doing things in many ways: http://freedominput.com/site/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=34
What is great about the Freedom BT keyboards is that unlike every other foldable I've seen they have a number row. Makes a huge difference if you're coding- on the IrDA keyboard I had for the Zaurus I had to press two keymodifiers to get a lot of punctuation chars like [, etc. The keyboard has been working well, but no Alt- modifiers present or interpreted by the driver; Ctrl- and Shift- clicking work fine, and there is a key which seems to be mapped to escape which is handy for bringing up context menus.
Not sure if regular HID-compliant keyboards (which just work on the Nokias) work in Squeak, but I don't see why they wouldn't.
Just a little info for those wanting to make a novy-HandheldPC-cum- Dynabook out of a Nokia 770/N800. :)
Regards, Aaron
"Aaron Reichow" revaaron@bitquabit.com writes:
Just a little note- I've had some luck using my bluetooth Keyboard with my Nokia N800 and Squeak.
Do you have any other N800 tips?
I've found an N800 and fired up Squeak on it and now I'm looking at how to make it usable. For example it seems like it would be nice to map some of the buttons to act as mouse clicks to access Halo menus.
If you have some tips I'm all ears. :-)
Luke,
Things have been nuts, but I do have some solutions lined up for this. I've not been Squeaking or even on IRC much over the last month or two, but I think (hope) things are quieting down some and have been there more recently.
In an N800/770 image I have around here somewhere, I don't have the buttons mapping as mouse clicks, but I have something almost as good. In my pda32 image I've got a side bar for switching windows, a gesture launcher, time, etc. I added two little buttons, one red and one blue [1] that you tap, and then tap somewhere else to get a middle or right mouse click. It isn't perfect, but for how much I use middle and left click, it works out. I personally would rather keep the buttons for UI interaction, though mapped in Squeak. We could probably find a way to do it both ways. What I use currently to do R/ M clicks is Genie- if I draw a Circle-R, the next tap it do is a middle click; a Circle-B does a right click. This is how I bring up halos and context menus right now and it works well enough, though it's cumbersome enough that I added the permanent buttons on the taskbar for it.
I'm not 100% as I checked it out a while back, but as is I'm not sure if any of the hardware buttons except the D-pad gets seen by Squeak. You can test this by opening Squeak, doing a 'do it' on Sensor kbdTest and pressing buttons. If this doesn't work as I remember, we might have some VM work to do.
I'd like to mimic what Nokia does with the hw buttons somewhat, perhaps doing something like this:
- Back: Go back in the view, or possibly switch to window you were last in. - Hold Back: Close the topmost window, possibly delete the topmost morph. When I use Squeak on a PDA, I encapsulate most naked morphs into windows when I open them, like BookMorphs, StackMorphs, the Genie gesture dictionary editor, etc, so mostly this is moot for me. I imagine that other people play with naked morphs more than I do, though. - Menu: This I'll map to what happens on the desktop when you hit escape- open up the context menu of the pane you're in, and if not that the World Menu. Maybe we could just map this to a right click, which usually would just effect the same behavior. - Hold Menu: Open the world menu, possibly the open... menu, or a better "Start menu" sort of thing. The latter is what I'd like to happen, though it will be longer off, when I get around to implementing a better 'start menu' sort of thing. - Home: Bring up the menu for switching between apps/windows. - Hold Home: minimize all windows and show the desktop; or, bring forth a desktop+Today Screen (ala CE) morph, which contains a bunch of Dashboard-like widgets, a summary of upcoming appointments, sort of like you already have on the Nokia with the customizable page with widgets you can add, drag around, and resize.
What I love about Squeak is that all of the stuff I just listed is so easy. I don't know where I'd start if I had to implement a Konfab- clone for Windows. On Squeak, it's almost all there already- add some UI for selecting which widgets you want, resizing without halos, etc and that's almost all you have to do. Man, I love Squeak.
Not sure about the top buttons yet. + and - would be nice a page up and page down; the full-screen button as either just that, or maybe some sort of click.
The most amount of work that needs to be done, and would be useful on desktop Squeak too, is to get a better way to implement global key commands without requiring explicit focus or pointer-hovering. Cmd-W will close a window in Squeak, but only after I click on its title bar to focus that part of it. That drives me nuts, almost enough to try to tackle this pretty big issue.
Feel free to feedback on this!
[1] I'm sure I've got the colors wrong, but I never remember which mouse click color equates to left, middle or right. I'll look it up, but just mentioning this so as to not confuse you if I'm using the wrong colors. :P
Regards, Aaron
On Jun 25, 2007, at 2:49 PM, Luke Gorrie wrote:
"Aaron Reichow" revaaron@bitquabit.com writes:
Just a little note- I've had some luck using my bluetooth Keyboard with my Nokia N800 and Squeak.
Do you have any other N800 tips?
I've found an N800 and fired up Squeak on it and now I'm looking at how to make it usable. For example it seems like it would be nice to map some of the buttons to act as mouse clicks to access Halo menus.
If you have some tips I'm all ears. :-)
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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Aaron Reichow -
Luke Gorrie