meadl-devel team mailing list archive

[Jorge Silva <jorge.silva@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

After discussing this architecture with Jan Richards, my supervisor, he
suggested to try to exhaust first the possibility of providing built-in
access to all Android apps as supposed to starting with the separate UI
as Eric and I had planned, and after doing a bit more research, it
actually seems it may be way easier to provide full access than we
originally thought for the following reasons:

1. According to:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/04/creating-input-method.html
custom input methods (that provide text to applications) can be defined
and used as default once installed. We already knew this but the news is
that:

2. According to:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/04/updating-applications-for-on-screen.html
we can explicitly hide & show the input method area (on-screen keyboard)
even when no text input field is currently selected (e.g., show it on
any switch change, like a "wake up" kind of feature) and,

3. According to:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/KeyEvent.html
we can send programatically any hard key event to the system (including
D-pad events) from the input method window, thus, we can potentially use
the input method window to translate switch events into D-pad keystrokes
that allow us to move across the UI.

Depending on further coding, we could either include the switch event
provider into this custom input method or keep it as a separate service
as it is currently planned, however, there would not be any need for a
separate accessible launcher (UI).

Let me know what you think... I'll try to come up with some mock-ups so
you get the idea better.

cheers!
Jorge

On 05/27/2010 05:06 PM, Jorge Silva wrote:
> Hola,
> 
>   I committed a diagram for the proposed android app architecture based
> on our discussion on Tuesday. You can download it from here:
> 
> http://tiny.cc/yeoef
> 
> Please let me know if you have any comments, edits, etc...
> 
> I think this architecture can ensure early success by allowing us to
> focus on core activities to be performed on the phone (e.g., making a
> call, sending an email) as supposed to trying to make the whole system
> accessible at once. Later we may want to consider ways to merge the
> accessible activity launcher with the accessible input method so that
> users don't need an intermediary app and 3rd-party applications can be
> made accessible.
> 
> As you know, work on the Arduino board and Android switch event provider
> has already started.
> 
>  Let me know what you think.
> 
> cheers!
> Jorge