Summary

Introduction
Installation
Several keyboards
Skins
Quick switch
Popup keyboards
Word suggestion
Gesture shortcuts
Toolbar
Settings

Introduction

Slide Keyboard is a virtual keyboard with keys 4 times bigger than the standard android keyboard.
The purpose of this software was to designed a keyboard which prevents typing errors caused by small size of the standard keyboard keys.
In order to have bigger keys, each key contains 5 characters.
You just have to touch a key and swipe your finger in the direction of the letter you want to write.

Installation

After downloading Slide Keyboard from Android market, you have to do select it in Settings AND Input method menus.

1. You must select it in settings (Locale & text settings for android 1.6, and Language & keyboard settings for android 2.0 or newer versions) :

2. You must select Slide Keyboard in the list of input methods by doing a long click on any editable text area. You should see this menu appears :

Select Slide Keyboard and voila, it should automatically appears each time you want to type a text !!!

Several keyboards

You can choose between 2 different styles of keyboards :

 

Standard style

Computer style

The standard style provides only 2 rows of buttons which allows to give more space to the part of the screen being edited.

The computer style provides 3 rows of buttons and has a layout similar to keyboards available on computers.

You can change the style used at any moment in the settings.

When the phone is oriented vertically, you can access to 2 different keyboards.
You can switch between the different keyboards by choosing the "ABC" and "SYM" keys on the bottom right corner. The "ABC" keyboard provides 4 different modes : alphabetic, qwerty, azerty, dvorak. You can change the current mode in the settings. Here are screenshots of those keyboards :

Vertical alphabetic keyboard		Vertical qwerty keyboard
Vertical azerty keyboard		Vertical dvorak keyboard

The numeric and symbols keyboard looks like this :

The horizontal view displays two more keys than the vertical one, therefore the main keyboard contains alphabetic and numeric characters which simplify the writing of text with numbers.

Skins (only for Slide Keyboard 2)

Skins support is a feature only available on Slide Keyboard 2. Skins allows you to entirely customize your keyboard. You can change the position of the letters, the appearance of the buttons, the colour of the font... You can basically create any keyboard you want!!!
You can create a skin for you own usage or distribute it on the Android market and even sell it.
Check SK Skin Creator page for more details.

Quick switch

Quick switch is a functionality which allows to switch between the two keyboards by pressing the action button of your phone. A simple click will switch the keyboard and reverse it automatically after a letter has been typed, a double click will switch the keyboard permanently. When you are in temporary keyboard switch, the background will be displayed in blue as you can see :

Popup keyboards

If you want to type special characters (like an accentuate character), all you have to do is to swipe your finger in the direction of the corresponding standard character and keep the key pressed until the mini keyboard appears :

Word suggestion

Slide Keyboard contains multiple dictionaries in order to display suggested words while you are typing. Languages currently supported are english, french, german, spanish, italian. New languages will be added in the future. YOU MUST DOWNLOAD LANGUAGE DICTIONARIES FROM THE MARKET IN ORDER TO USE THIS FEATURE.
When Slide Keyboard detects that a word is not present in the dictionary, it automatically adds this new word to the user dictionary. User dictionary words are displayed in red in the list of suggested words :

You can delete user dictionary words by doing a long press on the word. The following dialog will appear :

Gesture shortcuts (for Android 1.6 or newer versions)

Gesture shortcuts is a feature that allows you to draw gestures directly on the keyboard in order to execute several actions. When you begin a gesture, you will see a gray line following your finger. When a gesture is detected, the line changed to yellow :

Here is the list of gestures you can do on the keyboard :

	Delete a letter
	Insert a space
	Go to the next line (except when writing text messages)
	Change to upper case
	Write a left parenthesis
	Write a right parenthesis

Toolbar

You can access to the toolbar by clicking on the handler displayed below the keyboard.

The main utility of the toolbar is to give you a quick way to edit your text. You can cut, copy, paste and select your text easily by clicking directly on the buttons which is a lot more quicker than using the contextual menu. If you don't want to display the toolbar just deactive it in the settings.New features will be added to the toolbar in the future.

Settings

You can customize Slide Keyboard via the settings menu :

•  keyboard style : switch between standard and computer style keyboard,
•  keyboard type : switch between alphabetic, azerty and awerty keyboards,
•  vibrate on keypress : vibrate when you press a key,
•  sound on keypress : play a sound when you press a key,
•  auto-capitalization : automatically change the mode of the keyboard to upper case after a dot,
•  swiping detection sensitivity : sensitivity of key detection when swiping,
•  repetition speed : speed of repetition when you are holding a key like 'Delete' for example,
•  gesture shortcuts : use gesture shortcuts,
•  display toolbar : display the toolbar below the keyboard,
•  speed of display of mini-keyboards : how long you must keep a button pressed before the mini-keyboard is displayed,
•  quick fixes : automatically correct common mistates by choosing the most likely suggestion,
•  show suggestions : display suggestion of the dictionary,
•  auto-complete : automatically complete a word with the suggested one when you insert a space or a punctuation,
•  auto-add into dictionary : automatically add new words into dictionary.