Keyboard "insert" feature
asked 2014-11-14 11:05:41 +0300
Using Messages app i'm always pleased with its clean design, its usability, but at the same time I miss some truly useful features like inserting photos, videos, recording ecc. in my messages, especially when using some chat protocol like xmpp or Facebook (that's still xmpp I think).
Without mitakuuluu around lately, the situation has become even worse.
So I was thinking: adding feature to receive that kind of data without breaking the "flow" doesn't seem too difficult, the issue comes with inserting. But I love how pasting works in Sailfish OS.
It's so simple, if you have copied something, a paste icon magically appears in the first row of your virtual keyboard. It's like a contextually activated feature. Why not to develop this kind of behaviour? Imagine: if I'm writing, first row suggests me words to put in, if I'm not, it suggest me to put in something else. In a message this "something else" could be a photo, a recording and so on (provided that you are using some protocol supporting it), in another application it could be even more.
In this way we can have a keyboard capable of inserting not only text, but contents, sharing design between different kind of apps, without stretching our fingers to the edge of the screen, in a simple, dynamical, elegant and "Jollaish" way.
What do you think?
Hm, this is actually a pretty cool idea. I doubt people start typing something with the suggestions at the top anyway, so that space could definitely be used to have 'insert picture, video, ...' buttons instead (as long as no text is entered). +1 from me!
nthn ( 2014-11-14 11:14:48 +0300 )editNot bad. I like it. There could be a problem with timing, though: The kbd needs to know when to switch between "show word suggestions" and "show insert controls". This would probably be achieved via some timeout after the last character typed. It will be tricky to find a good setting for this timeout.
Maybe a different approach would be to have a pulley menu at the bottom that is attached to the keyboard, not the application. It could provide context sensitive "insert..." options whenever you edit something that accepts non-text elements as inline content. It might even be used in such situations to expose formating options (bold, red, arial, 18pt,...) to the user in a unified way across the platform.
ossi1967 ( 2014-11-14 15:28:50 +0300 )edit@ossi1967 Yeah, that's another idea. But I think in that way we could end up having some apps (like mail) with three pulley menus: one at the top, one at the bottom, and one at the bottom of the keyboard). Furthermore, we can still use the first row to format text, simply making that options appear when we select some text.
AnonUser4803 ( 2014-11-15 12:50:33 +0300 )edit