🗺 Keyman Roadmap - March 2020

Thanks @Luke – those are good thoughts around optimisations. I think most of the more interactive ones will probably have to wait until v15 but we’ll definitely be referring to your suggestions when we do the improvements we have scheduled for v14 as well.

Keyman Messenger
I was considering how Android mobile phone vendors like Samsung make it next to impossible to install your own fonts. Then how fortunate it is that the Keyman editor app can work with a bundled font, and wouldn’t it be great if the app had a “Send” button? :grinning:

So, a wish list item for the next Roadmap would be to launch a “Keyman Messenger” companion application. There’s likely a cross platform OpenSource messenger app out there that could be built upon to get started.

We’d love to do something like this but it’s outside the capacity of the Keyman team to take it on. The good news is that with Keyman Engine for Android, any Android developer should be able to integrate Keyman into a messenger-style app, if you can find someone who’d be interested in putting it together!

Thanks @Marc , I may suggest it for a senior project or perhaps to someone looking for a Google Summer of Code project. If this actually happens and a volunteer makes an initial version, could the Keyman team maintain it?

I’d like to be able to say ‘yes’, but I don’t think we can commit to that. Maintenance of projects is expensive and we are already stretched too thin maintaining Keyman as it is :frowning:

Good information thanks for sharing

Keyman 14 will be released in a few weeks with full localization (except macOS which we were unable to finish this release, sadly). You can localize now at https://translate.keyman.com/ and if you get the translation in soon, it will make it into the release.

A consideration for the roadmap -KeymanTV! One of the few remaining places where I cannot yet use keyman is when I try to search on my television for a video. I’m thinking here of most any modern TV in the last decade that is network enabled and supports apps for YouTube and the like where the user must resort back to English based searches.

Samsung and LG are big vendors that have TV operating systems based on Android. Similarly, Amazon’s Firestick, and Roku are Android based (guessing a bit) and Apple TV is probably iOS or macOS based, which are already supported by Keyman.

A difficulty here is of course installation. Some of these platforms also will have app stores for distribution. The Keyman team would have to work with these vendors in any event, possibly this opens a door for a commercial licensing opportunity with these vendors that may also be in want of a multilingual typing solution.

Thanks for the suggestion @dyacob! I think this is a good candidate for our LDML keyboard project. If we are generating keyboards that match an open standard there is a bigger incentive for TV developers to use them.

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To quote Dire Straits (featuring Sting): “I want my, I want my, KMTV…”

(my whole life has been leading to this moment :slight_smile: )

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:laughing: :laughing:

Could we please add suggestion for Desktop in Keyman version 15.

Hi @mayura! You probably are going to be sad when you hear this – but we don’t think we can achieve suggestions for desktop in 15.0. Our current priority for 15.0 is to support LDML keyboards. The good news is that work we do in 15.0 will make it easier to support suggestions on desktop in a future version.

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A thought for the roadmap. It seems most modern laptops will have a trackpad that has positional sensitivity. That is, the OS gets a signal that the trackpad was touched on the left, right, top or bottom. Could Keyman catch these tap events and use them as part of an input method?

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Thanks for the suggestion @dyacob :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:. I think at this time, multi-device input methods would fall outside the scope of what we are trying to tackle with Keyman – we’ve got enough challenges just dealing with keyboards cross-platform :rofl:

Aww… I was really hoping to get more out of my thumbs. I’ve got two of the darn things and all that they can do for me is hit a spacebar. :wink:

On a more serious note, I thought that the trackpad might be helpful in the design of an input method made for people who have only a single hand to work with.

Fair enough – accessibility input methods are certainly of interest but again we are at capacity with our current focus so need to maintain that focus for now. If you find some funding and/or interested developers and we’d certainly be keen to have a discussion though!

We’re tracking slowly on some of these features, but I’ve captured your feedback @Luke in an issue on GitHub so we don’t lose it. I am about to publish an updated roadmap and you’ll see a focus on Predictive Text in an upcoming release.

We have just updated the roadmap; please post feedback on the new roadmap at :world_map: Keyman Roadmap - March 2022