Looking for an in-depth keyboard design guide

Question

I know that there were questions about the keyboard here, but none of their answers helped me. I am new to android, but I am an experienced programmer. I'm looking for something to show me, preferably from scratch, how to write an Android keyboard. I want to write something that doesn't look like a standard keyboard (I think 8pen). I looked at "Creating an Input Method" and SoftKeyboard . The problem with the first is that there are not enough details - this tells me what different classes do, but not how to edit them in order to get what I want. The latter is great for changing what happens when a standard keyboard is used, but in fact there is no information about changing the layout.

tl; dr I want to make a keyboard, which is essentially just 8 giant buttons. Where can I find out how to do this?

Answer 1

Here is a good example to help you get started: http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/SoftKeyboard/index.html

From there, everything else is Android development for Android. Detailed documentation can be found here: http://developer.android.com/index.html

Answer 2

There are several examples for the soft keyboard in the sdk / samples / version file. These are googles native modifiable code. In addition, you can create several keyboard skins using the listed examples or a smart key.