Ideas

Emmanuel, I know, that's my point. I know that you are technically not far from this customization. After all, you already offer the complete (not to say, unparallel) customization of sliding and what characters it produces in all directions (this feature alone is the worth the price of Fitaly, IMO). We can customize the characters that are produced by the sliding in every direction, the only thing left is to customize the characters *on* the keys themselves. You are very very close to delivering that, if you so choose. Even peculiarities of Greek as the multi-accentation of some vowels such as ι,ί,ϊ,ΐ or υ,ύ,ϋ,ΰ can easily (and very elegantly) be handled via the rich sliding support of Fitaly. Fitaly is an a class by itself here.

The way I imagine this: ok, I am a technically skilled user, so I don't have a problem editing ascii files and finding each character's unicode value. That, combined with the sliding, would provide all the support needed. You could technically provide a front-end utility (desktop-based, preferably, so that it could accomodate users of Fitaly on other platforms, to not take precious storage on the PDA and to not confuse users who have no need for this) to assist less technical users to do create this ascii file, but this is not really required--more luxury than anything.

The only thing left is how to do the switching of the layouts (locales). I envision it just how you described it, by having a key dedicated perhaps to this function, which would switch the layouts or bring up a little menu to choose a layout, if the layouts are more than 2--personally, I would also use a German layout as I occasionally write letters and emails in that language. That key would have the name of the active layout ("En","Gr","Ge" etc.)

An even better idea, though, is to provide this switching functionality in the actual icon of the SIP on the lower right of the screen (that's how InterKey does it, I believe.) I actually like this much better, because it allows you to not dedicate and waste an actual keyboard key for this function. It's more intuitive and elegant also, and it doesn't penalize users with no need for multiple languages. Related to this, this functionality on the icon could be automatically disabled if there's only one layout defined as to not confuse users who have no need for multiple languages (the icon in that case would be as it is now--no change).

Yes, the main (letters) panel is what we are interested here. We could go crazy having the ability to customize other panels too, but I think that's stretching it--not really necessary.

Another good idea might be for you guys to have a place on the site where users can submit their national locale layouts, so that less technical international users can find them and download them. You will need to let the world know about this internationalization of Fitaly, though, because people now know that Fitaly doesn't not support localization--I have become a big fan of Fitaly recently, and in every discussion I had with other PPC and Palm users here about Fitaly their typical response rolling off their tongue before I can complete my sentences is "Yes, but it doesn't do Greek."

If you later see that this is starting to take off, popularity- and sales-wise in other international markets, you could offer incentives for people to build other locale layouts by offering, say, a free license to Fitaly to whichever user submits a layout that doesn't already exist.

I believe this will open new doors and markets for Fitaly. And the kicker is that it may not be so difficult or time-consuming to implement--you guys are so, so close to providing a true international solution.

Thanks for your time. If there's anything I can do to help, please don't hesitate to let me know.

Cheers,

-ilias.