Hello Mark how is life ?

hello, Dimitris!

how can I help you today?

I am wondering if there is a way of deactivating a button on the AOSP soft keyboard

are you forking it to create your own IME?

or do you mean as an app developer running on a device that happens to use that IME?

no I would like to know if I can somehow get the key event and disable it (I know that this normally only works with hardware keyboards)

the 2nd

for your own activities/views, you might be able to do that by consuming the key in onKeyDown()

basically that IME can get the user out of my kiosk mode and get him stack there

but you can't do that across the whole device

so onKeyDown will get triggered from the AOSP key presses

well, it gets triggered from any standard key event

I will check it thx

it's not tied to the AOSP keyboard specifically

sadly it doesnt trigger it

what button are you referring to?

actually I cant see any button click triggering it from the soft keyboard

just overriding the onKeyDown should be enough right ?

well, that depends

for example, if the IME is displayed because the focus is on the EditText, you would need to create a custom subclass of EditText/AppCompatEditText and consume the event there

onKeyDown in the activity will get all key events not consumed by the focused widget and its parents up the view hierarchy

I see ! well if that can work I will do that since I only have

it in an edittext

and it sounds very reasonable I dont know why I didnt think of that

the only thing in an IME that might not trigger a key event would be any sort of button that opens up some sort of settings screen (e.g., to configure the IME)

One more question related with IMEs

oh

anyway of getting that button clicks?

write your own IME

worst case option I guess

or, switch to some IME that does not have that sort of button

basically, the IME is part of an app

it can do whatever it wants

its job is to provide keyboard input to other apps via the input method framework

but, it can have its own settings screens or whatever else it wants

sometimes, that stuff is only reachable through a separate activity

sometimes, the IME has a button or gesture or something to get to this extra functionality

there's very little that you can do about that, other than impose greater control on what IME gets used

that, in turn, can be a pain for dealing with multiple languages

I will search for an IME without settings and if none exists I will have to make my own

if you're using standard Android 5.0+ kiosk stuff, I would assume that there is a standard solution for this

if you're doing your own kiosk implementation... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yep Im doing my own since the device owner version is kinda meh

actually only the keyboard issue is left

everything else works fine

So one more question regarding the IMEs

do you know if its possible to have a non keyboard app that acts like an IME (basically gets a call when the user focuses an editable field)

well, an accessibility service finds out about focus changes

IIRC, anyway

can I also check if the focused thing is editable and paste something inside ?

presumably, as AFAIK some password managers do that sort of thing

I haven't looked into it specifically

Android 8.0 offers autofill, but that's still as the Android O preview at the moment

well im on 4.4 and 5.1 :P

basically I saw an app on a tablet that had a floating button and you could click it to past in the focused editable field

paste*

and the same time the keyboard appeared

my guess is that it is using an accessibility service

so I kinda need to implement something like that

thank you, I will check it out

One last question for today

have you ever tried to animate viewpager transitions

I haven't customized from the stock transition

as I haven't really had the need

well I was asked for a fade out to black and fade in from black animation per transition

that feels awkward from a UX standpoint

and it was kinda getting messy so just didnt use a viewpager but animated the imageviews

the user swipes, and all of a sudden the screen goes dark?

no it wasnt made to swipe

oh, then ViewPager probably wasn't the best choice anyway

yep

ViewFlipper or something

or, as you did, direct animations on the views

does it get fancy to have the viewpager with videos images and generally different content

sorry, I do not understand that question

well case I need to have video content as a page do I have to worry about performance or so ? Or do I just have a thumbnail until the animation stops and the video playback starts

basically if the viewpager is videofriendly

I have never tried putting a VideoView, SurfaceView, or TextureView in a ViewPager

or a ViewFlipper for that matter

me too

so, I have no idea, sorry

I guess we will know next week

thats all I got for today!

thanks for your time

have a great day :)

you too!