Ah, so the bumpbox is an auto-hiding normal box.

DevDoo6:

offbeatmammal:

One problem I have is that the little Tip tooltip keeps appearing and sometimes I end up hitting that, rather than the key I'm aiming for

Try adding StayOnTop command line parameter. That should stop anytjhing getting on top of the keyboard.

:( Still getting the TIP prompt for me to use the handwriting recognition, and sometimes even the full recognizer pops up! I'll try rebooting and restarting (exiting and restarting the app didn't help)

Good luck getting a new car ;(

offbeatmammal:

:( Still getting the TIP prompt for me to use the handwriting recognition, and sometimes even the full recognizer pops up! I'll try rebooting and restarting (exiting and restarting the app didn't help)

Good luck getting a new car ;(

Then I am baffled. The StayOnTop parameter takes the keyboard to the top every 10th of a second. So nothing should be able to stay on top of the keyboard long enough to be troublesome. But I must admit I haven't tested it against TIP on Vista. Also ensure you have the current version of ZWKB. Misspelled or invalid parameters are ignored rather than reported. So double check the spelling. The parameter is specified like this example:

zwkb.exe StayOnTop NoBumpBox Res=1024x600

I have already bought another car. Getting a BMW 330Ci on Friday. So everything should be back on track. If not, well at least my car will be once I work out what all the buttons do. Maybe it will need a ZWKB upgrade with additional command line parameters. Haha.

Version 7.9.6 released.

www.freshnet8.com

Just a few minor touches in this version. The cursor keys have been rearranged as an upside-down T block making them easier to use for people used to the normal arrangement of these keys on a physical keyboard. Also implemented auto cancellation of Ctrl and Alt keys after a key press.  The default colour scheme of the keyboard has been freshened up from the boring black on white.

Very nice. Thank you. ZWKB has compleely rplaced other input methods for me. You've one a great job.

Because I'm lazy...what switches would I use to change back to the original color scheme? And do you feel the new color is more usable?

You could use the program I made to handle switches

elempoimen:

Because I'm lazy...what switches would I use to change back to the original color scheme? And do you feel the new color is more usable?

Remove all command line parameters to get the default. The new default is Yellow on blue. For some reason that didn't look as "basic" as black on white. It's all very subjective. I think you are better off finding the colour scheme you prefer most. Instructions on how to change the foreground and background colours are stated in a previous post and also in the readme.txt file.

I have done some preliminary investigations on the interraction of Vista's TIP popup and ZWKB. Unfortunately, Microsoft made the TIP popup a special kind of window that has a higher Z-order than all normal windows and popups. For this reason ZWKB cannot rise above that.

Regretably I am not inclined to develop software that works only with Vista. So Vista users of ZWKB will have to live with the problem, or find ways to manually switch on or off the TIP popup.

Assuming the popup is always in the same place, you could check for an hwnd there that isnt your form's, then force it to not be on top

When I am using ZWKB I usually just switch off the TIP popup.   I don't remember the exact wording of the checkbox, but it is right there under the "Opening" tab in Options.

Version 7.9.23 released.

www.freshnet8.com

Typematic
Typematic action, or automatic key repeating action, is available for cursor keys Up, Dn, << (left), and >> (Right). This feature enables rapid cursor movement within applications that manipulate documents. To begin repeating of a cursor key, double tap the cursor key with a very fast tapping motion. Once the cursor key is automatically repeating, tapping anywhere on the keybaord immediately stops the repeat. Activating the peek function also ends the repeating.

Colour Palette
The keyboard foreground and background colours are based on a new palette of 64 colours taking the number of distinct combinations into the thousands. Directly equivalent colour numbers are used for both the Foreground and Background command line options. The existing colour numbers will produce different colours. Therefore these options will have to be recalibrated.

Command Line
The Res and Res2 command line parameters have been renamed to Size and Size2.

Peek Function
The peek function will only be activated when the mouse cursor is within the screen boundary of the keyboard. Windows function of the right mouse click operates normally when the cursor is outside of the keyboard.

Default Settings
The default setting of the keyboard has been refined to improve experience for first time users. The noticeable change to existing users is that the keyboard symbols appear larger than before and the font size components of the existing command line options for Res/Res2 (now Size/Size2) may have to be recalibrated.

Very nice, but what about the non-latin keyboard layouts?

There's no plan to produce the keyboard for other languages at the moment. Although this is a possibility in the future. The keyboard is not yet finished. So development will continue to focus on this.

I have tried many on-screen keyboards, and some of them actually work, including this one, but none of them are actually useful to me, because all the authors concentrate on English and ignore other languages. It already includes switching between multiple layouts, so the possibility is definitely there. Could we possibly have editable layouts in a configuration file or something?

Many things are possible given time and effort. For now I have neither to spare :).

I think you will find greater success approaching a Russian developer who would have greater motivation to develop such a keyboard in your language. Otherwise, you'll just have to wait for technologies to emergy.