Using a keyboard with Squeak on the Nokia 770/N800

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" <[hidden email]> 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: