[Nook Touch General] nmyshkin:
Time for a thread reboot!

Since the Multiling keyboard would not play nice with me, no matter what I tried to fix the issue with the long-press options display in the normal keyboard mode, my attentions began to wander. Somewhere in the dark recesses of the forum I found a reference to the AIType Keyboard app. I searched for an old copy, found it and began to test it out.

It has a more limited language range then the Multiling keyboard, but those other languages on the Multiling required an addon and the last time I tried to help someone with it, we could not get it to work. Also, there is no finger-tracing recognition (I'll

really

miss that!). I tried to track down a few language plugins for the AIType Keyboard, but the ones I found refused to install (Arabic, for example). As it is, it works fine with languages using a Latin or modified Latin alphabet, Greek, Korean (surprise), and languages using Cyrillic. Much of that probably has to do with what the NST can support. "Download" invitations in the initial part of Settings do not work. The app contains a custom certificate which I'm sure has long-since expired. I also suspect the language addons are not actually free, so even if you track down an old one, it's not going to work.

I could not figure out the "prediction" stuff (possibly because I don't care about it), so I won't say it does not work. The app can even read your text in the edit mode using TTS.

And yes, the long-press options work on all the keys in all the modes!

Also there are many different keyboard styles to choose and you can change the colors of many things. Alas the color changing is done with the typical graphical picker. While a hex value for the selection is shown immediately after it is chosen, if you take a peek at the preferences.xml file, the colors have been obfuscated for some reason. They look like signed twos complement. Don't get me started.

Anyway....I played around trying to get something clean, resembling the stock keyboard. In the end when I had what I wanted I noticed that the navigation arrows in the edit keyboard were nearly invisible, being white on a white background with just a ghostly outline. I therefore altered those few images to make them gray. No other changes (except the signature, of course) have been made. See screenshots below for what I came up with.

If you like the looks of what I did or want to use it as a point of departure, see the spoiler that follows. If you would rather have the original, un-modded app and work with it yourself, you can download it from here.

To install and use, just treat this as a user app. It can figure out what to do. If you decide you don't like it, uninstalling will give you back the stock keyboard.

Spoiler content hidden.

Edit: 7-30-22--Ah, nagware. You gotta hate it.... How to stop the "limited time only" nuisance that comes up too often when the keyboard opens? I played around with this awhile and discovered that a likely setting in the xml preferences file I attached seemed to do the trick. I changed a date to some time in 2025 and no more nags. After that, well, I'll just change it again. I've updated the zip in the downloads, but if you have already made settings changes and don't want to start over, you can do this yourself. Look for this line in the xml file:

<long name="next_expiration_reminder" value="1657490536337" />

Your actual value (extended date time format) may be a little different, but what you want to do is change the second digit to a "7" so the line looks like this:

<long name="next_expiration_reminder" value="1757490536337" />

You should do this by copying out the file, making the change and then copying back over the original file.