Freitag, 28. August 2009

Calculator Plugin and Keyboard Plugin

Thanks to the "Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft" (literal trans.: 'Austrian Researchfundingassociation') the SIMON listens team has been expanded with the two summer interns Mario Strametz and Dominik Neumeister.

After some general testing and getting to know the system, they are now working on two promising command plugins: A calculator plugin and a keyboard plugin.

The calculator plugin is a natural extension of the existing input-number-plugin.



As seen it is still quite basic but already usable to a certain extend. However, it is under heavy development and we expect first stable versions by the end of next week.

The calculator is - beside the obvious - also targeted to school kids doing their math homework so upon pressing ok it provides the option to not only write out the result but also the calculation leading up to it (e.g.: "1+1=2" instead of just "2"). The finished version will also include formatting options like formatting the output as an amount of money, etc.

At the same time, the two are working on a keyboard plugin (no screenshot there yet as development has just started). However, our "keyboard" will not only be a regular on screen keyboard.

The keyboard plugin will not have a fixed amount of fields (keys), nor will their values be fixed to that of a qwerty keyboard.

Instead, the user will be able configure them as he likes in configuration sets (sensible defaults will of course be provided) and even spread the keys out across multiple tabs.

While this just seems overly complicated on paper it makes advanced configurations possible with e.g. a text-snippet tab that combines his most often used text snippets or allows the user to add - for him - important special characters (e.g. Currency symbols for an accountant) right where he wants them.

I will update this blog as the development progresses so check back!

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