Goamo - "True VGA"-Compatible SIP

[Janak Parekh]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.ppcw.net/?itemid=2146' target='_blank'>http://www.ppcw.net/?itemid=2146</a><br /><br /></div><i>"These new Pocket PCs with VGA screen are pretty cool, especially if you tweak it a little bit with SE_VGA or OzVGA to get the VGA resolution for other applications like PIE as well. However, there is a downside which is the SIP keyboard which stays small and pretty tiny. However, now there is a solution from 'Goamo' available: This VGA SIP Keyboard displays a large, usable keyboard even in true VGA mode (480X640 96DPI enabled by SE_VGA or OzVGA utilities). Replace that tiny default keyboard and easily browse the web in true VGA while using the VGA SIP Keyboard to easily input URLs and data. Great for data input into any application whenever operating in true VGA mode. Additional home, end and delete keys make text editing easier."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/parekh-20041208-GoamoSIP.gif" /><br /><br />An increasing number of people are using VGA Pocket PCs, and this is one common complaint I've heard and found myself about "true VGA" setups. Other folks are working on a solution as well, but if you need something now, here's a choice. 8)

[Jonathan1]

This will be useful when I get my 4700 in a couple weeks. 8) :)

[Jonathon Watkins]

This will be useful when I get my 4700 in a couple weeks. 8) :)

Ah excelent. This looks good. I'll give it a try tonight.

[muaddip]

It works pretty good. I have it for my x50v and it is great when I switch into True VGA mode.

There is one thing though, it does not yet support sliding, i.e. capitalizing a letter by tapping the letter and dragging the stylus up without taking it off the screen. However, I am sure it will be added sometime soon.

The new version also offers two different color skins, blue and ivory to go with the silver, you can only have one color installed at a time, but the blue one looks nice.

[Jonathon Watkins]

There is one thing though, it does not yet support sliding, i.e. capitalizing a letter by tapping the letter and dragging the stylus up with out taking it off thescreen. However, I am sure it will be added sometime soon.

:| I hope so. I use that functionality a lot.

[Deus]

Yeah, I'l wait for the slide ;)

[yvilla]

Just in case people don't know, Calligrapher has a popup keyboard that is also full size in true VGA mode. For those who like me handwrite most of the time, this is the best of both worlds -- good handwriting recognition, but a full size keyboard (or even your choice of a smaller symbols keyboard) available any time you might want one.

[gibson042]

What does it look like in landscape orientation under true VGA mode? I have yet to see a SIP that handles that condition well, but if this "Goamo" is designed for VGA then it just might be the one...

[wbgordy]

sliding, i.e. capitalizing a letter by tapping the letter and dragging the stylus up with out taking it off thescreen

Wha? Can you explain this a bit? Is this for the default keyboard?

edit - never mind. I figured it out. Wow, I didn't know you could do this. Makes me wonder if I've missed anymore little goodies like this.

[cptpoland]

FITALY keyboard is at v3.5 rc1 and works really great with true VGA, both in portrait and landscape modes.
The best keyboard out there.

Here is the link: http://fitaly.com/pocketpc/fitaly3releasenotes.htm
CP

[JBPLCMS]

I've been using the Resco keyboard which is VGA compatible. In addition, someone on the Brighthand boards made an exact replica of FITALY by customizing Resco Keyboard. Both work great. I personally prefer Letter Recognizer, but I'm not aware of anyone that's created a VGA version.

[gibson042]

FITALY keyboard is at v3.5 rc1 and works really great with true VGA, both in portrait and landscape modes.
The best keyboard out there.

Here is the link: http://fitaly.com/pocketpc/fitaly3releasenotes.htm
CP
http://fitaly.com/board/winceforum/uploads/SIP-landscape.gif
Eh. Fitaly works really great in portrait orientation under true VGA, but not in landscape. It eats up too much vertical space, and wastes too much horizontal. The latter problem I know is directly attributable to Microsoft, but I'm not sure about the former. It will take someone with more knowledge of Windows Mobile application development than me to answer that question.

But anyone who claims that the above picture represents a usable and convenient interface for text input is in serious denial. I couldn't find a screen shot of Goamo in landscape VGA. Can anyone post one, for comparison purposes? For that matter, can anyone post a screen shot of any SIP that works well in landscape VGA? I don't think one exists, probably due to Microsoft's halfhearted implementation of landscape, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

[Janak Parekh]

FITALY keyboard is at v3.5 rc1 and works really great with true VGA, both in portrait and landscape modes.
Yep - I'm waiting to post on it when 3.5 goes gold. :)

--janak

[cptpoland]

Here is my setup with the FITALY keyboard in landscape mode using true VGA.

As you can see a lot of the webpage is still visible.

http://www.ochrona-gwardia.com/images/display_1.jpg

CP

[gibson042]

Touché. That looks as good as you can get, and I will concede that it is usable. Thanks a lot!

[alizhan]

VGA keyboards are nice, but has anyone found a VGA replacement for Block Recognizer? Calligrapher is neat and all, but I actually find BR to be both faster and more accurate. The lack of a usable BR is why I dropped WM2003FE+MyVGA for straight WM2003SE.

My Palm roots must be showing... :oops:

[rzanology]

I just installed this thing and it doesn’t work. When I try to select it from the input menu, it just goes right back to the default keybord. I even tried going over to the input settings and setting it there, but it did the same thing. What is this?!?!? 

[jonathanchoo]

Doesn't this defeat the point of 'real' VGA? :wink:

Looking at the screenshots of landscape mode I really think Microsoft mess it up big time with such wasted space. palmOne's implementation IMO was better.

[jnunn]

I had a reason to call FITALY this week and the very pleasant customer service representative told me that version 4 of FITALY will be out soon for VGA devices and that the version 3.5 registration codes will access version 4. Apparently they also believe that version 3.5 can use some improvements in VGA.

[Janak Parekh]

palmOne's implementation IMO was better.
There's a variety of workarounds, including the use of Calligrapher, if you need it. Personally, I use landscape for webbrowsing and Excel, and the rare time I need to input I can pop up Fitaly -- and you can't do that in landscape with the T3 or T5.

--janak

[Jean Ichbiah]

http://fitaly.com/board/winceforum/uploads/SIP-landscape.gif
Eh. Fitaly works really great in portrait orientation under true VGA, but not in landscape. It eats up too much vertical space, and wastes too much horizontal. The latter problem I know is directly attributable to Microsoft, but I'm not sure about the former. It will take someone with more knowledge of Windows Mobile application development than me to answer that question.
You have a point. But most of the problem comes from the poor design of the Pocket PC main screen, and Explorer:
* Bloated title bar
* Bloated URL text box
* Bloated horizontal scroller
* Bloated bottom bar.

This was already wasteful in portrait mode but in landscape it ends up taking landfill scale proportions: about 180 pixels of the 480 available are wasted in this way.

It did not have to be that way. There is no reason to have both a title bar annd a bottom bar. The URL could be on the title bar. There could be another less wasteful mechanism for the the horizontal scroller, like sliding on the text


But anyone who claims that the above picture represents a usable and convenient interface for text input is in serious denial. I couldn't find a screen shot of Goamo in landscape VGA. Can anyone post one, for comparison purposes? For that matter, can anyone post a screen shot of any SIP that works well in landscape VGA? I don't think one exists, probably due to Microsoft's halfhearted implementation of landscape, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

If we admit that input in landscape is occasional -- like entering an url or changing a number in a spreadsheet -- a reduced size keyboard is an alternative. For example here is what you get by opening the quarter VGA Fitaly:


http://fitaly.com/board/winceforum/uploads/minifitalyexplorer.gif

I tried it and it is definitely usable. (Yet, you won't challenge Erwin Franz' Dom Perignon record with something of this size :wink:

On the waste of horizontal space, we need help from MS: it would be nice to be able to make the input area transparent. This way you could still see what is outside the keyboard.

[gibson042]

If we admit that input in landscape is occasional -- like entering an url or changing a number in a spreadsheet -- a reduced size keyboard is an alternative. For example here is what you get by opening the quarter VGA Fitaly:


http://fitaly.com/board/winceforum/uploads/minifitalyexplorer.gif

I tried it and it is definitely usable. (Yet, you won't challenge Erwin Franz' Dom Perignon record with something of this size :wink:
Not bad. One has to wonder if landscape input would still be as rare as it is if the WM OS developers had their heads on straight, but that is addressed in your next point...

On the waste of horizontal space, we need help from MS: it would be nice to be able to make the input area transparent. This way you could still see what is outside the keyboard.
Given their track record of rushing to the aid of application developers, I wouldn't advise holding your breath. Is there anything that can be done now, though? Obviously you can't make the input area transparent, but is it possible to make an orientation-aware SIP? In the case of Fitaly, you could have an option to display the number pad and/or punctuation panel (for example) alongside the standard keyboard when in landscape. It wouldn't give any space back to the application, but at least it would do something useful with otherwise dead real estate... if it's possible to go wider than 480 pixels, that is. Do you think you can provide a little more enlightenment on whether or not this could be done?

[Jean Ichbiah]

Given their track record of rushing to the aid of application developers, I wouldn't advise holding your breath. Is there anything that can be done now, though? Obviously you can't make the input area transparent, but is it possible to make an orientation-aware SIP? In the case of Fitaly, you could have an option to display the number pad and/or punctuation panel (for example) alongside the standard keyboard when in landscape. It wouldn't give any space back to the application, but at least it would do something useful with otherwise dead real estate... if it's possible to go wider than 480 pixels, that is. Do you think you can provide a little more enlightenment on whether or not this could be done?

First of all it is not that obvious that the SIP area cannot be made transparent. We need to ask MS about it (and my experience with them has been rather good in the MSDN program -- at least I get to talk to humans and they answer emails).

On your suggestion of filling the unused white space (flower arrangements, or better... some advertising :wink: ) I am not too positive. What the user would really like to see is more of the application and any decoration we add will be perceived as clutter.

[Kati Compton]

On your suggestion of filling the unused white space (flower arrangements, or better... some advertising :wink: ) I am not too positive. What the user would really like to see is more of the application and any decoration we add will be perceived as clutter.
At worst it'd be nice to have additional keys (ie, show the alpha at the left, then numeric, then punctuation, etc), or even keys for user-assigned macros (for different usernames, etc). If you can't make it transparent, make it useful. But that goes back to having different SIPs in different orientations.

Edit.... uh - looks like gibson already made that suggestion - I didn't read the quote thoroughly - sorry!

[Jean Ichbiah]

But that goes back to having different SIPs in different orientations.

Either different SIPs or different incarnations of the same SIP depending on orientation. We'll look into it (but don't hold your breath as it could take weeks and more).

Also keep the pressure on MS to reduce these bloated bars which take 37% of the screen space in landscape mode.

[jmirabil]

Hi guys,

If you own an ipaq hx4700/4705 and like using Bluetooth and/or wireless alot.... you will have problems...

BOTH Calligrapaher 7.4 and the Goamo SIP ver 1.0 (I'm upgrading to 1.1 tonight) do NOT work well with an ipaq hx4700 running Bluetooth and Wifi--and they run "intermittently" with just BT or wifi loaded. You often have to tell the Goamo kb to load by choosing "VGA Keyboard" from the bottom right SIP interface menu. I like the blue keyboard. I cannot get Calligrapher to autoload at startup with both wifi and Bt enabled on my hx4700. Very irritating! Calligrapher blames HP's engineering, and I blame HP and WM2003SE. If I unload BT and wifi, then I can both load the Goamo and Calligrapher... More irritating!

I'll be writing Goamo on this later....see if they can make a smaller footprint SIP keyboard that properly autoloads on the hx4700 w/ BT and wifi loaded [this is why I got it, already owning Calligrapher] and a partially transparent one as well. I like the idea of also adding 'the cap letter with a tap then upstroke' on the goamo.

Anyone else experiencing this? I believe HP will fix this with a firmware upgrage eventually, but HP is oblivious to this issue and seemingly in denial of it. I even sent my 4700 pda in and was without it for two weeks, and they claimed they could not even dupe it! I got it back and had the same problem...Frustrating.... -Jonathan

[gibson042]

That sounds like an out of RAM issue. Have you moved all of the programs that you can from main memory into flash ROM or a memory card?

[jmirabil]

Sure did, Gibson! I even got a 64mb to 128mb upgrade on the hx4700 HPC's ram... same issue, ram upgrade made no diffference. HP's engineering and/or Win2003mobile SE's ability to handle wifi/BT on startup and other SIP programs is ***very poor***. Reminds me of the old windows 3.0 to 3.11 WFWG days. Really disappointing, actually. This is nothing new though, as my old IPAQ 2215 was comparably worse, then a year later a 1.10 FW was released that solved almost all the issues. Same old frustrations. Shame on them for doing it again and again...

So I guess I'll, or rather we all will, have about 9 more months to wait.

Got a great response from Goamo--regarding the memory footprint and the 1.0 to 1.1 version change Dean at Goamo said: "Version 1.1 has a smaller footprint (1.0 was 468KB now 1.1 is 178KB),
also v1.1 sets a flag to let Windows Mobile 2003 SE that the
application is high resolution aware. This may also help solve some issues."

Well done! I have confirmed the memory footprint is indeed lower. They also recommended a link at:

http://www.pc-counselor.com/How_to/#defakeyboard

that says how to change the VGA Goamo kb to the default.... they stated that the class ID of the Goamo VGA Keyboard is:
{48D2326B-9C23-4cd6-94F1-134F28283864}

Dean wrote: "Using the PHM Registry Editor (free) you will have to delete the 'DefaultIm' key and add it back (string value) with the class ID above. You can export the class ID for the default keyboard first (to put it back if you ever need to) using PHM as well. This should solve the problem of having to reselect the keyboard after a soft reset.

Another GREAT response!

I'm not going to try this yet until I backup my unit... anyone try this and report here if it does indeed change your VGA Goamo kb to default? Let us know!

-Jonathan

[jmirabil]

oh, by the way, here's what "Phatsupport" wrote me on the Wifi/BT problem with Calligrapher on startup:

"First, please understand that the issue with Bluetooth / WiFi is very poor
design on the part of HP, they are loading those as processes instead of
services, and that takes up too much of the process space on the device. It is not just memory. We cannot fix their poor design, as much as we would like to. You can verify this yourself, look at the running processes.... there is a huge amount of stuff running, even when it looks like there are no applications."

So it looks like HP is the culprit, loading wifi and BT as processes instead of services--taking up too much of the process space on the device.

So grab your ankles so to speak and wait....


So Calligrapher said "It's HP's issue" and gave me no workaround or anyting to help me and Goamo, in the two days since I've owned the product, cut their footprint in a third and gave me one of the best techsupport response messages I've ever gotten.

Kudos to Goamo at $6.00, and shame on Calligrapher at $30....

-Jonathan

'fool me once, shame on you.... fool me twice, shame on me....'

[daxim]

I just downloaded the latest version of the goamo keyboard, 1.3 now supports gestures. The gestures seem to work better than the MS gestures, you don't have to move the stylus as far.

[rrmccabe]

I feel your pain. I have a 4705 as well and jump between BT and 802 often. I use the reset button on the bottom more than I do the power switch.

I have the latest version of Calligrapher but cant use it because of the reasons you mentioned. I bought the upgrade which turned out to be useless as well.

I bought the goamo keyboard but it would not even load with BT or wireless on. I sent a message to support tonight but have not heard back yet. I also downloaded Resco and it loads OK. Have not give it a good shake down yet.

Phatware blamed Microsoft when I talked to them and not HP. They said its an OS issue. Be nice if they would put a notice up about this problem. I am a little irritated to say the least at Phatware's give a crap attitude. At least they should have offered a refund on my upgrade.

Waiting for Mobile 5.0 hoping thats the fix.

Rich