Wanna FatSIP?

I've been looking for a finger-friendly on-screen keyboard for my CE tablets, and I think I finally found one on sourceforge.net. It's called FatSIP. Though I assume it was intended for Windows Mobile devices, it works nicely on my Stylistic and ViewSonic V212. (Below is a screenshot from the Stylistic.) Once installed, it's added to the Input Panel selections in the Control Panel (and the SIP selector button on the right end of the system tray). The keys are user-customizable using a settings utility (FatSIPSettings.exe).

Though the SIP DLL file itself (FatSIP.dll) identifies its OS version as 4.1, I haven't been able to get it to work thus far on my Airpanel 100 after changing the OS version of FatSIPSettings.exe from 4.2 to 4.1. (I tried both hexediting the CAB file directly and extracting the files and then hexediting FatSIPSettings.exe.) FatSIPSettings.exe opens and appears to work fine, but I can't get the keyboard to show up as a selection in the Control Panel/system tray button.) For 4.2 and higher, though, this appears a nice SIP alternative.





Attachments
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Fat Keyboard.JPG (50KB - 8 downloads)

Looks like a great tool, especially the "BS" key. I'd love to have a BS key on my work computer, when I'm asked for analysis on something I know nothing about......hmmm, let's see.....I could either spend several hours researching the topic and writing my analysis, or just hit the BS key and let the computer do it for me.

Oh, wait....you mean "BS" stands for "Backspace"? Drat.

One of my favorite memories from college is from an Air Force ROTC class. The instructor made it very easy, including open-note tests. However, the final exam ended with an essay question that I hadn't taken notes on and knew little to nothing about. Being a decent writer, I figured I could bluff my way through it, and proceeded to write a full page of wonderful-sounding prose that had nothing to do with the topic. When I got the final back, I turned to the last page to find "BS" written in large red letters at the top of the page.....guess he knew I was bluffing......

You beat me to it

LOL

I got to thinking about what you were doing and thought, hey, isn't there already an onscreen keyboard that works doing that? Then I looked and loaded up Artskeyboard.

I opened up PocketWord and gave it a try...it seems to work fine on my old SVGA MP800. And of course there are versions for any processor. The program itself allows the keyboard to be enlarged or shrunk by 20 size increments, up to the maximum key size defined in the keyboard definition file.

The thing about the definition file for the keyboard is it is a simple text file where you enter the the key size. By default, the keys are 14 x 14, but I changed them (using simple Wordpad global search and replace) to 20 x 20 and the keyboard pretty much filled my 800x600 screen. Some of the special keys need to be resized individually as they aren't squares, but so you can see a screenshot of it on my old MP800.

Of course the advantage of a keyboard like this is the many many languages and special keys and macros you can define. I could easily have made the keys fill a much larger screen...





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artskeyboard.jpg (96KB - 3 downloads)

No doubt, ArtSKey is nice but, IIRC, it isn't free. FatSIP is not only free, but it's open-source, so people can try their hands at tweaking the program itself to further meet their needs. (Even in its present form, it does nearly all of what ArtSKey does. Instead of using a TXT file, it uses an XML file and a DAT file to define the settings.)

Check it out for yourself:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fatsip/

Edited by CE Geek 2009-08-17 3:03 PM

Free? You said free!!! Well that's a different matter entirely!