Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then why is a flip phone in the title? That was not specific to flip phones at all.
Because vastly more people will know what "flip phone typing" is over "T9 typing".
Plenty of feature phones were not flip phones.
Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
On Android, I always enjoy how the dial pad in the phone app will let you start typing in numbers and it tries to match into a name or number. My favorite one, 666, brings up "Mom" as the first result.
This feature is missing the final 20% in an infuriating way - it doesn't match characters with accents, so i can't use it to find my family.
Check the living room, sometimes near the tv. Usually my family come home when they are super hungry, so you can just wait till then.
Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver
#63There's also a T9 keyboard for android on the f-droid store https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.sspanak.tt9/
Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then why is a flip phone in the title? That was not specific to flip phones at all.
Because vastly more people will know what "flip phone typing" is over "T9 typing".
Probably in regions of the world where flip phones were the dominant form factor for phones...
Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver
#65Very cool, I implemented this once in python, it's a fun exercise, and knowledge that is gradually disappearing (modern phones with 12-key physical keyboards usually don't even have a T9 implementation, and when they do it doesn't perform well, even higher-tech KaiOS phones).
Although I appreciate the effort, I see a couple of issues with this implementation:
* The demo doesn't seem to work properly, the first thing I tried to type was "hello world", but it didn't recognize "hello" and I got "43556" instead.
* The word list is generated generated C code, which makes it hard to use other dictionaries (languages) or to add words during use (you can't add all place and people names to the list, but people are going to want to reference a handful of them many times). Loading from and appending to a plain text word list would make more sense, and maybe additionally use a custom binary format for the trie structure for fast loading into memory once a word list is imported on first use (hardware that would benefit from T9 might not be fast enough for conversion to be "instant")
* Non-latin script support would be nice. Although I have no knowledge whether Greek or Cyrillic languages used a T9 mechanism, it would be a minor change to define. Korean 12-key typing is also very cool, but I don't know whether that counts as T9.
Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver
#66[deleted]
Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried plugging a usb keyboard into your TV? It's always worked for me. My lifelong habit of connecting keyboards/mice to random devices to see what happens has been overall fruitful - hell, even the Wii supported keyboards iirc. Used my Android to test an Apple Magic Mouse at a yardsale recently too.
Nice! I’ll be honest, it’s not worth it. I’m just at the point of “if I can’t do it more easily with the remote, I’ll settle with doing it frustratingly with the remote”. I could probably get my Bluetooth keyboard paired up to the tv, but how often am I going to use it compared to how often it’s sitting in the living room unused? It’s really more that I’m frustrated with the poor UX choices that will never go away, o…
> I’m just at the point of “if I can’t do it more easily with the remote, I’ll settle with doing it frustratingly with the remote”.
This is one of the reasons that, while I actually pay for Netflix & Prime, I still torrent most of what I watch and play it of my little media array via an rPi plugged into the TV. Finding things is easier, there are a couple of extra steps getting the content if I don't already have it locally, then interacting with it is easier.
From GP comment:
> Have you tried plugging a usb keyboard into your TV?
On the rPi, my remote is a mini USB keyboard, though with wireless comms between it and the USB dongle.
The TV I have now could probably have a keyboard plugged in directly too, but I've had this setup since before I had a TV that claimed to be smart.
Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because vastly more people will know what "flip phone typing" is over "T9 typing".
Will they? I don't think I've ever heard it called that before.
Yes they will. I'd never heard the term T9 before this thread. If I saw it on its own I'd think Arnold was attempting to make another Terminator movie.
Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I figured other way around… Kids These Days might be more likely to have heard of a “flip phone” than “t9” and thus “engage” with this “content”
I had not heard of T9 before starting the project and getting interested, I'm too young to have experienced owning a pre-touch screen phone. I don't know if the average HN reader knows what T9 is, so I went with a term that I was fairly certain most people would be familiar with. Is that so people engage with my work? I certainly found the project fascinating, I made the library to share that fascination. If I can ge…
Nice! I clearly made an assumption that you were an Old like me :D
Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there are lots of repeated key-hits, right? Nope, one key per letter. T9 uses an internal dictionary to figure which word you meant, with some memory for preferred words when there's multiple matches and adding custom words.
Exactly this, and occasionally you'd have multiple words come up for the same number combo, but in a consistent manner where the user could learn how many times you needed to hit the 'next' button to get the word you wanted.
The phone I used t9 on the most had the "next" button on the * key, an option to sort based on frequency, and replaced the word with "spell?" before cycling the list allowing you to manually edit the word and add it to your dictionary. I assume disabling that sorting function was preferred for people blind-texting.