Keyboard

[Hidden30 3]

Hello 

 

I have just received my pro 1 however due to the lack of instructions I have two bits I am struggling with was wondering if anyone could helo me 

1. I cannot get my apps to go into landscape mode when the keyboard is out 

2. How do I assign keys to open apps from the keyboard 

 

Thank you 

[Craig 1,435]

1.  Two settings are relevant to this:

A. In settings there are slider settings, these are settings specific to the keyboard.  One says force landscape when keyboard open.  If you turn this on, it'll work for the majority of apps.   

B. In quick-settings, you can turn on auto-rotation.  This works for more apps than the force landscape slider setting, but some apps are still forced portrait no matter how you rotate.

C. If you must turn apps landscape that are forced portrait, use split screen to put them on half the screen.

 

2. I havent played with this but I think its in slider settings too.

Edited January 7, 2020 by Craig

[EskeRahn 5,427]

On 2, that is in the launcher.

• Press and hold any blank space on the home screen,
• Select Home settings
• Select Keyboard Shortcuts

[Hidden30 3]

1 hour ago, Craig said:

1.  Two settings are relevant to this:

A. In settings there are slider settings, these are settings specific to the keyboard.  One says force landscape when keyboard open.  If you turn this on, it'll work for the majority of apps.   

B. In quick-settings, you can turn on auto-rotation.  This works for more apps than the force landscape slider setting, but some apps are still forced portrait no matter how you rotate.

C. If you must turn apps landscape that are forced portrait, use split screen to put them on half the screen.

 

2. I havent played with this but I think its in slider settings too.

Thanks for your help I have Now enabled landscape mode but when the keyboard is out and i try to assign a keypad short cut all it does is open goggle search and populates the field with the letter I’m trying to assign to a particular app

 

cant work out where im going wrong   ?

[EskeRahn 5,427]

38 minutes ago, Hidden30 said:

Thanks for your help I have Now enabled landscape mode but when the keyboard is out and i try to assign a keypad short cut all it does is open goggle search and populates the field with the letter I’m trying to assign to a particular app

 

cant work out where im going wrong   ?

Short cuts works, and are set up, from the home screen. Press the Logo F key, and do as described above. Just tested, works fine.

[Ilrilan 54]

Can't find, how can i type "?" and "/" on Pro1 keyboard. Yellow symbols are here:

 

But it's buttons "l" and "p". Other yellow symbols typed with shift (f.ex. 9 is "9", shift+9 is "("). But this buttons with shift are "L" and "P". How must it work?.. I can write my own layout with ExternalKeyboard, but must be more simple way.

 

[Doktor Oswaldo 904]

41 minutes ago, Ilrilan said:

Can't find, how can i type "?" and "/" on Pro1 keyboard. Yellow symbols are here:

 

But it's buttons "l" and "p". Other yellow symbols typed with shift (f.ex. 9 is "9", shift+9 is "("). But this buttons with shift are "L" and "P". How must it work?.. I can write my own layout with ExternalKeyboard, but must be more simple way.

 

It is on yellow arrow plus the button.
P.S. I strongly recommend a look at FinQwerty

[EskeRahn 5,427]

27 minutes ago, Doktor Oswaldo said:

It is on yellow arrow plus the button.
P.S. I strongly recommend a look at FinQwerty

Yes, and please note if not using FinQwerty but the default driver for the qwertY layout, you should NOT select "US", but DE-select all tick-boxes. A bit counter-intuitive, I know. And this also means the symbols on the digits needs Fn (i.e. yellow arrow) rather than shift - and that is counter-intuitive too.

ADD: Notice the slightly odd "None" offered by FinQwerty, the purpose of that is to offer the exact same thing as no tick-boxes selected. BUT this can be combined if you use more than one language.

[Ilrilan 54]

Thanks. Yes, problem was in selecting "US" layout in default driver for qwerty layout. 

 

I'll look at FinQerty too - haven't used it before, i used ExternalKeyboard for creating custom layouts.

[EskeRahn 5,427]

20 hours ago, Ilrilan said:

Thanks. Yes, problem was in selecting "US" layout in default driver for qwerty layout. 

 

I'll look at FinQerty too - haven't used it before, i used ExternalKeyboard for creating custom layouts.

There are several matching the name  ExternalKeyboard in the Android Market it seems. Can you please tell us the manufacturer?

[shani 14]

On 1/7/2020 at 10:26 PM, EskeRahn said:

On 2, that is in the launcher.

• Press and hold any blank space on the home screen,
• Select Home settings
• Select Keyboard Shortcuts

Wait what?! Why the hell would they hide this away in the launcher?
This means anyone using a different launcher can't access this feature, which is a really bad and user-unfriendly decision.
This should either be in system settings or a separate app, not part of the launcher. Wow.

[EskeRahn 5,427]

1 hour ago, shani said:

Wait what?! Why the hell would they hide this away in the launcher?
This means anyone using a different launcher can't access this feature, which is a really bad and user-unfriendly decision.
This should either be in system settings or a separate app, not part of the launcher. Wow.

Well as a luncher thing, I feel that setting it up from within the launcher settings is a quite natural place,

Any other Launcher can implement similar things. But it would be a bit odd for the Pro1 to overrule the keyboard usage any launcher might have.

I would have expected that the default behaviour of the keyboard in a launcher would be to jump to the icon with the text matching what you started typing.

Several launchers launches a search dialogue when using the keyboard.

So one of these behaviours could be a short and the other a long press.

Of course one could imagine F(x)tec had made an OPTION to setup some default behaviour to fall back to if the launcher ignores the keyboard. But I'm not sure if the 'system' even has the information that it is the current launcher app that is the active app when a key is pressed/held, so might not even be technically feasible.

[shani 14]

How is this a launcher feature though? It has nothing to do with the launcher since you actually bypass it by using keyboard shortcuts.

On 1/23/2020 at 10:03 AM, EskeRahn said:

Any other Launcher can implement similar things. But it would be a bit odd for the Pro1 to overrule the keyboard usage any launcher might have.

Lol why would any launcher implement that for a niche device like the pro1 that most people on this planet have never heard about?

And again, a system setting or app would not overrule any launcher since it has nothing to do with the launcher. It is only specific to the keyboard of the pro1.
You press some physical buttons on the keyboard, you don't open your launcher first to do that.

If anything, it's more a driver thing than a launcher thing. Pressing set keyboard combinations should work system-wide regardless of which launcher or browser or music app or whatever app you're currently using.

Making such a basic feature launcher-specific is just a terrible design choice.

Edited January 26, 2020 by shani

[Slion 1,200]

1 hour ago, shani said:

Making such a basic feature launcher-specific is just a terrible design choice.

Expediency could be behind that design decision. Keep in mind FxTec is a start-up. They surely had to make many time saving decisions to make sure they could deliver a product.

I'm with you though. Ideally we should have had global shortcuts implemented as a background service.

[cube48 51]

2 hours ago, shani said:

Pressing set keyboard combinations should work system-wide regardless of which launcher or browser or music app or whatever app you're currently using.

Making such a basic feature launcher-specific is just a terrible design choice.

It's not that simple. Such behavior could cause collision with many other apps (i.e. keyboard handlers). It's not in FxTech's (or any dev's) power to handle all exceptions and key-combo fallback situations for all possible apps. I also think they went with current solution for time being. Let's hope some skilled devs will jump up and improve this.
 

 

[shani 14]

6 hours ago, cube48 said:

Such behavior could cause collision with many other apps (i.e. keyboard handlers).

That's the user's problem, not Fxtec's.

If there were such collisions, the user can decide to turn off those shortcuts or to not use those apps.

Edited January 26, 2020 by shani

[EskeRahn 5,427]

16 hours ago, shani said:

Making such a basic feature launcher-specific is just a terrible design choice.

How is making the app launcher responsible for launching apps a terrible design choice?

I would actually find it rather odd if you could launch any app from within any other totally unrelated app.

But sure they could have chosen to violate the logic of Androids work flow. But they have actually been making a point on trying to mess as little as possible with the system, to give people a close to stock android experience.

I can hardly imagine an app supporting keyboard, where a long press on a key is not expected to give repeated keys. So for your idea to work you would require some modifier key combinationa not used anywhere else with the shortcuts. I fail to see the benefit over just pressing home, and long press a key....

...Or are you in reality trying to blame F(x)tec for other launchers ignoring the existence of a keyboard? (Remember keyboards are natively supported by android, it is not Pro1 only). You would have the exact same issue with e.g. a BT keyboard.

[silversolver 849]

9 hours ago, shani said:

That's the user's problem, not Fxtec's.

If there were such collisions, the user can decide to turn off those shortcuts or to not use those apps.

Umm, NO. It would be very stupid of F(x)tec to knowingly change the default behavior to something that will act weirdly for a lot of users. It's better to have it work in the usual, if boring, way out of the box, and then let someone else design the unusually-behaving program and deal with trying to support the issues.

Keep in mind that this is not meant as a UMPC, so PC-style keyboard shortcuts are not going to be expected by most users. On top of that, even on desktop operating systems most people don't use keyboard shortcuts to launch programs; they click something. The use case here is very niche. Let a niche developer do it.

[Slion 1,200]

1 hour ago, EskeRahn said:

How is making the app launcher responsible for launching apps a terrible design choice?

You have a point there 😁

[Slion 1,200]

I tried to setup Sym + B as a global shortcut to launch my browser using Tasker and AutoInput plugin but it looks like it does not support key modifiers in this way.

[Craig 1,435]

I think that'll be resolved with next OTA. 

[EskeRahn 5,427]

8 hours ago, Slion said:

I tried to setup Sym + B as a global shortcut to launch my browser using Tasker and AutoInput plugin but it looks like it does not support key modifiers in this way.

I do not know what the original idea in stock android is with the Sym key. But currently on the Pro1 it acts more like a letter key than a modifier key. That is holding it acts like a repeated key. I intuitively assumed it as a modifier. And I see you did too, But we could be wrong and it is by Android designed for something else, e.g. something similar to to current Alt pressed&released alone to get emojis and other stuff. Maybe Sym is supposed to launch a symbol picker? (That is not saying that it not could be re-purposed as a modifier)

And despite trying hard, I have not been able to come up with a realistic use where repeat can make sense on Sym, so I guess that is just a bug.

[Slion 1,200]

On 1/27/2020 at 10:37 AM, EskeRahn said:

I do not know what the original idea in stock android is with the Sym key

Basically a modifier like any other really:

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/KeyEvent#KEYCODE_SYM

[EskeRahn 5,427]

7 minutes ago, Slion said:

Basically a modifier like any other really:

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/KeyEvent#KEYCODE_SYM

Thanks, then repeat is just a bug....

[shani 14]

On 1/27/2020 at 1:56 AM, EskeRahn said:

How is making the app launcher responsible for launching apps a terrible design choice?

I would actually find it rather odd if you could launch any app from within any other totally unrelated app.

If you regard Android (the system) as an app, I guess.

I'm not talking about any specific app but a behaviour that works globally, independent of any apps or launchers.

Pressing the hardware keys triggers character or modifier events, no matter which app or launcher I'm using. That's the level I'm talking about. App shortcuts should work on the same level.

And I don't see how it would've violated Andoird's work flow. Android allows apps (e.g. launchers) do launch other apps, so a little app that runs in the background and lets you configure shortcuts would've been suffice.

On 1/27/2020 at 1:56 AM, EskeRahn said:

I can hardly imagine an app supporting keyboard, where a long press on a key is not expected to give repeated keys.

Then I guess you've never used any of the old QWERTY sliders before? If I long pressed a character on those devices, it would give me pop-up with all the different variations of the character (like á, á, ä, ê, ñ, ß etc.).