Blue Blazer

Achieve perfection by constant effort and creative will.
Code every day, no matter what...

As my first post, first say hello to everyone :)

Want a fancy input method user interface?
Want to put it inside your panel ?

I'm currently writing a plasma applet for input method, which enables different input methods (scim etc..) to share same unified user interface under KDE.
Its main features are there and with a fully working scim backend.
Have a look at some pics:




















  • Not a new input method, user interface only.
  • DBus-based, signal only backend<->user interface communicate
  • Svg themed, currently theme according to your plasma theme.
  • Layout to try to make the icon as large as possible under certain size.
  • Can expand/collapse from an applet to widget.
Its user interface is modern and highly integrated to KDE, which give you better user experience when typing text.
And it also break the situation which we only have gtk based input method now whose user interface is designed without concern KIG, KDE integration ...

The source code is under playground/base/plasma/applets/kimpanel
If you're a CJK person whom use input method a lot, have a try !

23 comments:

goooooood girl said...

i like your blog......

Anonymous said...

ee! shiny! :)
welcome to the planet. :)

Unknown said...

I am a student of Chinese, and I use SCIM every day. It is really, really good to see you are giving it some attention. SCIM is an area that is often neglected because it doesn't affect people outside Asia, but for people who want to write in other languages, it is absolutely essential.

Oh, and welcome to the planet :)

Christoph said...

Nice to see somebody working on this very much important topic. I think lack of support for Chinese is pretty much keeping away Chinese users from KDE and Linux itself.

On a personal note, I want to encourage you to not only rely on SCIM. I removed it just recently and now use fcitx. Since then my keyboard input doesn't break for the first time in 5 years!

Anonymous said...

Great! Now if I just could figure out which button I have to press to publish my comment...

Anonymous said...

Managed to press the right ones somehow, apparently. It's really cool to see that KDE gets attention too for things which aren't relevant for the great majority of KDE devs.

Freud said...

just found out that google translate doesn't translate button labels... :(

Wang Hoi said...

I just change the blog lanuage to English
Sorry for inconvenience.

Unknown said...

you misspelled the url, it's not under applet but applets!
full anonsvn url is:

svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/base/plasma/applets/kimpanel

Unknown said...

really great news... the current qt-bridge for scim isn't really ideal... all the best!

AC said...

Great to see this integrated into plasma itself! Keep up the good work

Anonymous said...

Will this work under kde 4.2, or is it only for the current trunk? I got errors compiling current trunk

Simon Gray said...

It looks lovely, however the main input panel needs some work, it's extremely hard to quickly distinguish between the different words when they're all the same colour and there's almost no spacing between them: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/__wNRAxUWzAo/SbJBW6UdxlI/AAAAAAAAACI/7mN8xdYtAYo/s1600-h/3.png

Wang Hoi said...

to metellius:
Current trunk only.

to mostwanted:
You're right, i'll improve it later.
I decide to finish another ibus backend now, then go back to ui.
Since scim is not very stable under KDE.
And i'm a bit tired of ui layout/drawings now.

maninalift said...

This is really cool. Great work. A massive boon for KDE4

Anonymous said...

Would it have an onscreen keyboard support? Onscreen keyboard is an important part of any desktop, but sadly enough KDE doesn't have one :(

Oncle Jean said...

Keep up the good work, I like it !

Anonymous said...

This is awesome. I hope it will be easy to set up. Current solutions seem require editing of config files etc.
Is there any chance this will make it into KDE 4.3?

elkos said...

I hope it does make it into KDE 4.3, i am a native greek speaker, i need english for work and my poor significant other is trying to teach me Mandarin (She is also a Wang!). I will test your applet the minute KDE 4 becomes available in Debian unstable.

JohnFlux said...

Could you add some level of distro integration please. So that users can easily chose a new language and install it. It's too difficult to install scim at the moment. It should be a one-click deal.

Anonymous said...

Hmm, http://code.google.com/p/ibus/ Fedora 11 is moving to use iBus instead of SCIM. Since iBus already uses D-BUS for communication, I think that it is a better fit.

Wang Hoi said...

Yeah, ibus are supported too. Based on the developing ibus 1.1.0

xinupp said...

maybe you can understand Chinese,so 你是个牛人!