Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

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Saturday, February 05, 2005

Here is a custom Resco Keyboard skin that improves on Fitaly in a couple of subtle ways:



There is the great Fitaly layout on the left. But in addition, all common punctuation is accessible from this screen -- no need to hunt through hidden screens. Some punctuation requires a slide (e.g. sliding up on "7" to produce a "&") -- in these cases, a small visual cue is given (e.g. the small "&" icon).

Note also the functional use of colour to give the user a sense of the structure of the layout (e.g. the "." is highlighted in green).

I also want to share something I discovered about how the Resco skins work. If you open the image file for a Resco skin (named "Default.png"), you will notice an all-red version of the layout. It turns out that each key is assigned a slightly different shade of red. To change the shape and position of the keys, you change the shape and position of these red shapes (in an app like Paintbrush).

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