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Managing Keyboard Inputs Methods

One problem that makes it difficult to quickly and efficiently enter large numbers of vocabulary directly into flashcard software if you are dealing with non-Roman languages is the fact that the user has to keep switching the keyboard input back and forth between English and the other language, whatever it may be. This is a problem for all the flashcard applications I have seen so far, with the exception with some older versions of iFlash.

I’m wondering if this is a completely insurmountable programming problem in OS X or if perhaps the Cocoa programming API does offer some way of overcoming this issue.

Today I found this in the reference for the NSTextFieldCell class:

setAllowedInputSourceLocales – Sets an array of locale identifiers representing input sources that are allowed to be enabled when the receiver has the keyboard focus.

allowedInputSourceLocales – Returns an array of locale identifiers representing input sources that are allowed to be enabled when the receiver has the keyboard focus.

I don’t know much about Cocoa programming but I wonder if these two things (OS X 10.5) or something similar can be used to help remedy the problem?

Also, programmers might want to read over this posting about keyboard events and non-Roman languages.

2 Comments

  1. The QIM input method for Chinese allows you to toggle languages by using the Caps-Lock key. I find this very convenient when I’m switching back and forth a lot.

    Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 6:16 am | Permalink
  2. K. M. Lawson wrote:

    That is true, also I have had some buggy behavior by QIM with the caps-lock. It sometimes gets “stuck” in the English mode and I have to exit the application and come back in and fiddle with things before Chinese suddenly works again. This happens most often when I’m working in a document where I’m switching between QIM (English & Chinese) and Korean.

    Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 8:25 pm | Permalink