Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Puzzle Pal update: now with decoders!

I just uploaded Puzzle Pal v1.1.0 to Android Market. It has a new Decoders menu with three decoders: Braille, Morse Code and Semaphore.

All of the decoders have a buffered area to show decoded output, so you can just keep adding new symbols and see what it spells.


Saturday, September 5, 2009

Customize the soft keyboard

When you type something in Puzzle Pal, it is usually just a sequence of characters, not a valid word. The Android soft keyboard has auto-correct as default, which can be a bit annoying. Fortunately, you can customize the soft keyboard by specifying the input type of the TextView.

When I am expecting text, I use this:

textView.setInputType(
  InputType.TYPE_TEXT_VARIATION_VISIBLE_PASSWORD);

Phone spell only accept digits, so I use this instead:

textView.setInputType(InputType.TYPE_CLASS_PHONE);

setInputType tells the system what you expect as your input. I picked visible password for text because that turns off auto correction. For phone spell, well, it is much more intuitive to offer a phone pad, isn't it?