Jolla: Confirms Onscreen Keyboard Details
In another day with a lot going on in terms of news, with Jolla taking to the stage earlier, it appears we have also had some more important info leak from the Oracle that is #JollaHQ.
@Jaahquubel @SwiftKey @Swype @HanWriting Sailfish has its own engine, based on Maliit open source project.—
Jolla (@JollaHQ) October 02, 2013
So the touchscreen keyboard has now been confirmed as the same open source type that was on the Nokia N9: Maliit. Obviously it may not be identical to the N9 keyboard, but nevertheless it stems from the same open source code.
Maliit Keyboard On Nokia N9
Maliit provides a flexible and cross-platform input method framework for mobile and embedded text input, including a virtual keyboard. It has a plugin-based client-server architecture where applications act as clients and communicate with the Maliit server via input context plugins.
Maliit is an open source framework (LGPL 2) with open source plugins (BSD). There are also proprietary plugins. It runs on most GNU/Linux distributions.
See some Screenshots, photos and videos, read reviews and Contact us.
Maliit’s Ohloh.net page shows our development history.
This is good news as the Nokia N9′s keyboard was very good with very nice haptic feedback and the Maliit-based onscreen keyboard will definitely benefit from the Jolla’s slightly larger screen (4.5″ vs 3.9″).
The question of the Swype keyboard has been raised a number of times here and now we know that it is the same keyboard as the N9 (which had Swype compatibility), perhaps it opens the possibility for a Swype port to run with Jolla’s Maliit-based keyboard ?
You can read more about Maliit here: https://wiki.maliit.org/Main_Page
Sail On…
I wanna have some swype like keyboard, please!
There is a thread on the Swype forum about if they will have a port available. Please post your support so it gets noticed:
http://forum.swype.com/showthread.php?12545-Jolla-Sailfish
Thanks Anon – there you go meldolion (and everyone else who likes Swype on the Jolla).
A toolbar over the cursor is orrible and make me angry
This detail would be implemented in Silica I guess, not in Maliit. Sailfish’s implementation might be different from N9′s
i hope
Cool to know! I’ll make a post and put yours in the reference link
Hi James – nice to see you here.
No need to reference our article (unless you plan on quoting our own opinions) as it’s just information gathered from JollaHQ so is free for all. Unless you mean Anon’s link maybe ?
I’m always here
Mostly silent 
I wanna do that as a start of a good cooperation and partnership between our websites. Since we’re on the same boat and it’s worth doing.
Just out of curiosity, will you join us in the up coming (Yet to be announced) event?
Hey, sounds interesting. Are you guys talking about “jollausers” & “jollatides” :-p (i follow both though)
Yes we also linked to Jolla Users the other day with the photo article – of course it is normal practice, no sweat.
I’ll send you my email address if you’d like to make contact that way for future chat. 
Cool! Send it to [email protected] please (this is the one I always check)
Thenks Redd!
I already sent it via DM to your twitter.
That’s very nice of you guys. I love both of your works/blogs providing us with exciting Jolla info. At the moment I have scarce resources to share or contribute I’m afraid (compared with yours of course), so I’d prefer keeping an eye on your sites
Looking forward to Christmas 2013
who cares about on-screen keyboard :@
hardware keyboard other ½
period
It’s also important that the onscreen keyboard is top notch for a lot of people.
yes, also we don’t know if there actually EXIST OTH with HWKBD what Marc said is that it is possible add it.
But core of keyboards is marginal .. HW keyb driver is simple plugin for Maliit .. same as SW keyb ..
Many couldn’t give a toss about physical qwerty, the overwhelming majority in fact.
They’re just not the tiny grouping of nerds who are FAR MORE vocal…
I know N9 is supposed to have swype, but I never could figure out what this could be. Didn’t bother to spend too much time either… but I can tell you can very well do without !
I think it’s worth pointing out that Jolla cannot just “port” Swype themselves, since it’s a proprietary license, so they’d have to buy it to include it in Sailfish OS.
they cannot “port” swype, but they can implement their own predictive text input keyboard… Google did it for android. And the result is good, i found it better than the n9 swype, except for when it “autocorrect” words on its own.
It’s almost a given they have predictive text.
The Sailfish TextArea component has a flag to switch it off…
inputMethodHints : Qt::InputMethodHints
Holds the hints to the input panel about the nature of the input this field expects. The input panel will display an input method suitable for the hints provided. The hints may be or’ed together:
TextArea {
inputMethodHints: Qt.ImhEmailCharactersOnly | Qt.ImhNoPrediction
}
The allowed input method hints are:
Qt.ImhDialableCharactersOnly – Phone numbers
Qt.ImhDigitsOnly – Integer numbers
Qt.ImhEmailCharactersOnly – Email field
Qt.ImhFormattedNumbersOnly – Decimal numbers
Qt.ImhNoPrediction – Disable prediction
Qt.ImhUrlCharactersOnly – Web address
See also enableSoftwareInputPanel.
https://sailfishos.org/sailfish-silica/qml-sailfishsilica-textarea.html
alright, it’s just that predictive text input is not the same as Swype, is it?
One important question to consider is, does it support multitouch?
Sure, the screen does, but that doesn’t mean
it’s implemented for text input.
Do you think that Jolla will come in different languages? I do hope they make a swedish version
I guess if the N9 version does then it should do…
I have found some minor defects in the localized keyboards of N9. For example, when making a long press on U key of the Finnish keyboard, now the defaul character is not the most frequently needed one. I think the defaulf of E should be é or €, and with the other keys the defaults should be ü, å and ñ. The other defaults seem to be correct. There are corresponding defects also in the keyboards of some other languages.
Would you forward this feedback to the people involved, or should I send it to Maliit?
I have added Armenian layout to maliit, and I hope that it’s included in Sailfish. Also, I hope Sailfish contains dejavu-fonts or some other fonts which contain Armenian glyphs because having maliit which unable to show them out of the box is not cool.
“based on Maliit” seems to be the salient point in this post. Openismus had to downsize in July and they dropped working on the project. The previous developers then moved to other companies including KDAB,
http://www.murrayc.com/permalink/2013/07/09/openismus-mini/
The github/gitorius repositories have had very few commits in the last year so I presume the development has happened elsewhere.
The SDK is obviously using Maliit still but it’s pretty basic and not exactly ‘polished’ so I hope Jolla have something up their sleeves.
Interesting link, thanks for the cite. Another curious post and thread is here
http://www.murrayc.com/permalink/2013/03/04/maliit-keyboard-improvements/
This is from March 2013, so predates yours. The comments thread gets into a discussion of how Maliit had to fall back from the caliber it had on the N9 due to licensing issues. Sounds like it likely hadn’t yet caught up when Openismus stopped work on it in July.
Perhaps Jolla have a set of patches they’ve not yet released?
Anyway, I’m one of those who (very) strongly prefers an HW keyboard, so not too concerned about on-screen.
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That’s funny, my N9′s OSKB is an utter pain to use…