[Tfug] Virtual Keyboard

[jblais]

> Bexley Hall
>
> What sort of interfaces are you interested in?
> You make "instruments", right?
>

We're interested in anything "slick" -- well... durable, cheap, simple for
me to program for....

Our latest machine has a touchscreen (Fedora 5), and the user does
everything through there.
I fixed up an alphanumeric and a numeric keypad for touch use.
Basically, our instrument users need to pick from options, and type in some
words for naming things they want to save.  The rest is control buttons,
text displays, some graphics (unless I can avoid it).


>
> I think text entry is always a challenge with anything
> other than a conventional keyboard.  *But*, often
> you can rethink your interface and come up with
> alternatives that *aren't* textual.
>
> Or, that aren't as *verbose*.

All of the "actions" and stuff that a user wants the machine to perform,
aren't hard coded.  Everything is in 2 layers of scripts, so the GUI looks
through the user's available scripts, displays the names of the scripts (and
comments) and then presents them in a generic pick screen.  Then each script
action can require different parameters, so the user is presented with
different buttons that he/she can use to set those parameters.  The user
then goes to the Run screen, and hits go.

Our machines synthesize peptides out of the 20 (or so) basic amino acids.
We've even configured some machines to synthesize DNA out of the 4 sugars(?)
(I'm not a chemist, Arginine, Thimine, Sistine, ).

Joe