I often end up using a program called Yudit, a Unicode editor written by Gáspár Sinai, even on a system that has native integrated support for multiple input methods, because it’s available on a wide range of systems and I’m familiar with the input methods bundled with it. For example, even though the same input method is supposedly available on both Microsoft Windows and through SCIM, there may be slight differences in the keyboard layouts that can result in typos if one is not careful.

It seems that the majority of wireless handheld devices ship with only one input method. Yudit does not appear to run on any of the major mobile operating systems, but it would be overkill anyway, since people aren’t likely to want to edit entire Unicode documents on their cell phones. On the other hand, it would be useful to be able to switch input methods, even if only to type a few words into an e-mail, or to look something up in an online dictionary.

In adapting input methods designed for personal computers to cellphones, one immediately runs into the problem that what would have been a single keystroke on a full-sized keyboard becomes a key combination or a series of taps on a keypad. With the predictive text systems used on some cellphones, one also runs into the problem of textonyms.

I wanted to see if I could port some of Yudit’s input methods to a mobile environment, so I ignored these problems for the moment and assumed, for the sake of simplicity, that the device had a full-sized keyboard. I also decided to write a Java MIDlet, because these can be run on a number of different mobile platforms. (Yudit itself is written in C++.)

Even this simplified version of the problem turned out not to be so easy. I tried using the TextField and TextBox classes in the javax.microedition.lcdui package, and while I was able to capture the user’s input and replace it with the appropriate Unicode, neither class handled bidirectional text very well.

I tried mixing the Chinese-CJ (Cangjie), Devanagari, and Farsi input methods (used for entering Chinese, Hindi, and Persian text, respectively), and the result was that my little program became very confused. On some emulated devices, the left and right arrow keys would move the cursor left and right, respectively, while within the Persian text; but on others, the effects of these keys were reversed, as were the effects of the backspace and delete keys.

It would probably take a lot more work to get any of these input methods working properly, but this was only a first attempt, which I wanted to document in case anyone else wanted to try something similar. Also, it’s possible that I would have been more successful if I had used UI libraries specific to a company or manufacturer, such as RIM’s net.rim.device.api.ui package, rather than the generic (and hence not as powerful) javax.microedition.lcdui package.

I’ve included several screenshots of what my little experiment looks like when run on Sun’s Java ME SDK mobile emulator with a generic device, as well as on RIM’s BlackBerry emulator with two different devices. The Devanagari did not render at all on the emulated BlackBerry devices. There were also some small layout problems, which I didn’t fix since this was only supposed to be a quick experiment.

Screenshots of experiment on Sun’s generic emulated mobile phone:

Screenshots of experiment on RIM’s emulated BlackBerry Curve 8300:

Screenshots of experiment on RIM’s emulated BlackBerry Tour 9630:

Considering the size of the mobile device markets in China, India, and the Middle East, getting different input methods to work in a mobile environment is an important (and potentially financially rewarding) problem to tackle.

– davinci

No related posts.

I featured a number of projects on the web site which had nothing to do with school. I posted articles on Buddhism and in Klingon, discussed the design of a really “old school” computer game, and reviewed books. The book reviews page was particularly interesting because I used it to hint at some parts of my life and some of my interests without being explicit; for example, Evelyn Lau’s Runaway was the autobiographical account of a Chinese Canadian girl’s escape from her abusive parents, and V. S. Naipaul’s travelogues recounted his observations about the malaise in the Muslim world.

When I was at the Systems Control Group at the University of Toronto, about half of the graduate students (at least those who showed up in the lab regularly) were Iranian. I learned Persian very quickly by listening to their conversations. So a rumour started about me that I could learn a language just by listening to other people speak it for a week. The rumour was very amusing to me, and I wish it were true. But the reason that Persian was relatively easy for me to pick up was that I had learned (and forgotten) how to speak Urdu previously, and had been writing software to parse Urdu, Arabic, and Persian texts for a number of years. Also, I could memorise songs and poems and recite them without, at first, understanding their meanings. My Iranian friends were very impressed by this, and taught several songs to me.

Some time in the summer of 2001, I added a Persian section to my web site. At around that time, my father criticised me for a web site filled with “frivolity”, and told me that any employer who saw it would laugh at me and not hire me. I knew that was nonsense, because my web site was in fact getting a lot of attention. People e-mailed me about various things on it from all over the world, so at least some people found it interesting, and perhaps these included my future employers. But I took it down while I planned a way to put up a “serious” web site — presumably one that looked as bland as everyone else’s — while still featuring the content that I wanted to showcase.

Then the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks happened. And V. S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in Literature. My parents were unusually quiet for the next little while.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 19: the demographics of my graduate school labmates
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
3. The causes of my depression, part 4: the Mentorship Program