The keyboard is also product
One evening of research turns 'add an integrated keyboard' into an engineering map of the world's writing systems: a Flutter package with two layouts, AnySoft Keyboard's sixty layouts in native Android (adaptable, he bets, with Claude), Meta's fastText for word prediction, and the taxonomy underneath: Latin, Cyrillic, right-to-left Arabic and Hebrew, Greek, Indic, Thai, and the CJK group where no keyboard can hold every character so input becomes prediction (pinyin: type the sound, click the character). Plus the flourish: an IPA switch printing pronunciation under each key, maybe sounding it on press. Strategy: ship two or three layouts, keep a toggle to the user's own keyboard.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 10:17 (AnySoft Keyboard, sesenta teclados)
- ↳ video diary @ 12:21 (el switch del alfabeto fonético)
- ↳ video diary @ 15:51 (CJK: el teclado que predice)
- ↳ Entry 221-2: Guinea pigs by design (el roadblock que pidió este teclado)
- ↳ video diary @ 13:06 (postscript: el teclado instalado, el IME depurado en vivo)
The feature came off the roadblock list as one line, integrated keyboard, and an evening of research returns it as a map. The candidates: a Flutter package that ships only two layouts ▸ 9:56; AnySoft Keyboard, open source with some sixty layouts but written in native Android, an adaptation he rates as tractable with Claude ▸ 10:17; and for the autocomplete half, fastText, the Meta-built pretrained model for word prediction across languages ▸ 11:15.
Underneath sits the taxonomy that decides scope: the Latin family with its per-language quirks, Cyrillic, Greek, Indic, Thai, Arabic and Hebrew running right to left ▸ 14:45, and then the CJK group, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, where no physical layout can carry every character, so typing becomes prediction: write ni hao as it sounds and click the intended characters from the candidates, the IME pattern ▸ 15:51. Those keyboards are a project in themselves ▸ 16:46.
el teclado también es producto →
The flourish is pedagogical: a switch that prints each key’s pronunciation beneath the character using the International Phonetic Alphabet, the standard built to encode every sound a mouth makes ▸ 12:21, so an Arabic or Greek key stops being a glyph you can’t say ▸ 13:11, maybe even sounding the letter on press, an idea Julia grades “curioso” rather than chévere, since ah-oo-eh wears thin ▸ 13:31. The shipping strategy stays humble: start with two or three layouts, grow support gradually, and always leave the switch that hands control back to the user’s own keyboard ▸ 16:54. A text box, examined closely enough, turns out to be half the app…
Postscript, video 228: the keyboard shipped, live-debugged during the socio’s surprise visit. He arrived with the Duolingo-language set installed, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean ▸ 13:06, and the predicted IME pain showed up on cue: the Chinese keyboard only accepted one syllable at a time, type mama in full and no character suggestion appears, fixed on the spot until long inputs resolved ▸ 13:21. Not yet native-smooth, already useful.