Attention everybody. I am getting hints about several people spending time and effort for generating language-specific keyboards. I did a quick one for Android this year (just a keyboard, not a keyboard builder) - because our users had started some bad hacking and were getting into bad habits and bad orthography for lack a of a keyboard (for WhatsApp mainly).
I am mildly aware about Keyman but it is far too can-do-it-all so making just a keyboard for Android was impossible for me in the little time I could spend on this. At the moment I find the Keyman documentation very confusing and it feels scattered over several locations. Could be me.
I am inviting everybody who is working on something like a Keyboard App Builder for Android or iOS or whatever to share their plans or progress somewhere like on this community. So that there is less danger of wasted double efforts. We might need one or two “competing” tools to make it fun and get excellence, but not too many. Rather collaborate on a few widely endorsed projects.
A great many people are successfully using Keyman. A well-designed Keyman keyboard can be deployed across all platforms, resulting in a consistent user experience and lower training effort. In addition, there is an enormous repository of freely available keyboards already done, so there is a good chance that one already exists to meet your needs. If not, you might be able to find one that could be modified to do so with minimal effort. Obviously, some languages have fairly simple needs that can be met with minimalist solutions, some of which may be natively supported on various operating systems. But beyond that, the world of keyboards gets pretty complicated pretty fast, so I don’t guess it is in the best interests of our organization to try to spawn multiple competing solutions when we already have one that represents tens of thousands of hours of invested effort.
@TomB I do not know you and I am new here. Can I write you off-list? Somebody else answered me off-list, so there must be a way.
Everybody please note that I do not promote competing solutions, I was trying to help different users (or rather makers) become aware of each others efforts.