January 6, 2010
♫ .Vn: The Beginning

quanganhdo:

Since I have submitted .Vn to the App store for reviewing, I’d love to share some ‘behind the scenes’ information regarding this short project.

As far as I know, there is at least one Vietnamese keyboard solution for the iPhone, which is conveniently named VnKeyboard. It, unfortunately, doesn’t support iPhone OS 3.1.2 and I have no idea when it would be updated to do so. As you may have guessed, I decided to roll out my own app.

Spending a few minutes browsing the net gave me the impression that the new VnKeyboard is delayed by technical difficulty which are completely understandable for those entering the jailbreak realm. I simply didn’t have the time and talent to venture into that mess, so an Apple-blessed app (i.e. no deep system integration) was the way to go.

Following that route means I won’t have the ability to type Vietnamese anywhere in the system and have to open the app each time I want to do so. Sure it is a major drawback for some, but if I could live without a Vietnamese keyboard for more than a year now, I would have no problem accept this inconvenience. All in all, it’s me who would be the first user; cater for my need is the first priority.

And so, what I was about to have is a simple text editor. A big text area coming with a software keyboard, that is. I would be able to change between Vietnamese and English input mode with a tap of button. I could choose to input by TELEX or VNI method (not that I know how to type by VNI). VIQR wouldn’t be supported, since it is awkward to access these ^*.? characters and the like.

A typical use case would be like this: some Mr N. wants to type his Tumblr post in Vietnamese. He terminates the Tumblr app and exits to the home screen. He opens up my app and sees a big welcoming text area. He types his thought in, and types it in, and in. After finishing his masterpiece, he pleasely taps the Done button, chooses to copy the whole thing to clipboard, quits the app to fire up Tumblr, pastes that in and tap Publish to complete his adventure. What if he wants to type something else for his email? Well, just rinse and repeat. My app doesn’t run in background, sorry. It’s Quit - Launch - Type - Copy - Quit - Launch all over again.

Now that I had a clear idea of what to make, I went on to read some Vietnamese keyboard’s source code. For the sake of simplicity, I skipped Unikey and checked out various JavaScript-based projects, like AVIM, CHIM or Mudim. Each of their length is well over 1000 lines of code and honestly, they weren’t a pleasure to read. AVIM’s source code is cryptic, CHIM’s variable names are sometimes nothing better than a mixture of i, j, k and p. Ironically these variables make up the most important part of the source code, so I had a hard time tracing through the file trying to understand them. Not that I want to criticize any fellow developers, they all did a marvelous work. It’s just these projects’ lack of documentation makes me complain.

Anyway, here are some relevant links for those wishing to dive in:

That’s it. See you in my next post on this topic (And in case you haven’t noticed, this is my first Project52 post).

@quanganhdo is a young talented Vietnamese developer, now studying in UK. He’s working on some personal projects and most of them are applications for webs or mobiles.

1:32pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zrh1VyJ571S
(Notes: 11)
  
  1. hynora reblogged this from imaxds and added:
    Coi cái “The right place of the Vietnamese accent” mới biết trước giờ toàn đặt dấu sai o___o
  2. imaxds reblogged this from frwo
  3. chizin reblogged this from quanganhdo
  4. cricesis reblogged this from quanganhdo and added:
    developer, now studying...UK. He’s working...personal...
  5. vukidrock reblogged this from frwo and added:
    ủng hộ nhiệt liệt :D
  6. frwo reblogged this from icememine
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