FAQ - agwells/dotdash-keyboard-android GitHub Wiki

Q: Isn't this an awful lot like that Gmail Tap April Fool's Day joke?

A: It is quite similar, but it's no joke. This is a real, working on-screen keyboard which I've been using full time on my cheapo phone since February 2012. Imagine my surprise when my personal software project was perfectly replicated two months later in Google's April Fool's Day video, right down to my rationale for designing it! I was planning to add a few more features before releasing it, but the video made me decide to publish this sparse but fully functional version ahead of schedule.

Q: This is nothing like the setup I use for ham radio.

A: No it isn't. Sorry! I'd like to add some more ham-friendly features, such as audio feedback, and timing-based input using one paddle, two paddles, and/or iambic, but I haven't gotten there yet.

Q: But really, why three buttons instead of just one?

A: This was actually a design decision. Not only does my phone have a tiny screen, it also has a very slow CPU. I found that input methods based on drawing on screen (or other usage of timing) frequently screwed up when my phone's CPU would bog down. By having a separate button for dot, dash, and space, it doesn't matter how slow the phone processes things, as long as it eventually registers each screen tap in the correct sequence.

Q: Where did you get all those Morse code groups for punctuation marks?

A: I made 'em up! I humbly call it Wells extended Morse code. Feel free to use those symbols in your own Morse code applications, although I would appreciate a shout-out.

Q: Can I add my own code groups?

Not in the app itself. In a perfect world, I'd put a full editor into DotDash that lets you customize all the code groups, but writing that would be a bigger task than writing the entirety of the whole program.

So for now, DotDash just has a hard-coded list of codes. If you can compile an Android app, it's trivially easy to edit that and recompile your own custom version (and hey, DotDash is open source, so go for it). But if you can't, it's not.