Charlie Harvey

Solved: Hackers Keyboard keys invisible on Onda v972 with Android 4.2

Written by Charlie on

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tl;dr The Hackers Keyboard app doesn’t play well with the Onda v972 tablet running Android 4.2.2. I made an apk which allows you to scale the key labels bigger so that you can read them. Grab a copy of Hackers Keyboard with improved keyboard label scaling.

Last night I upgraded my Onda v972 tablet to the latest Android release. Which mostly worked. I mean all my launcher icons went missing and shit, but c’est la vie. And hackers keyboard — probably my most used app — broke in an interesting way. The labels for the keys had scaled themselves so small as to be invisible. You could just about see that the labels were there if you scaled up to 800%.

The change that needs making is documented by stefan.j...@gmail.com in the coments of Issue 169 on hackerskeyboard, you change a file from the cource called java/res/xml/prefs_view.xml. Here is the diffdiff -r 9ff3ccbf154f java/res/xml/prefs_view.xml --- a/java/res/xml/prefs_view.xml Tue Jan 22 22:10:15 2013 -0800 +++ b/java/res/xml/prefs_view.xml Thu May 23 00:07:07 2013 +0300 @@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ <org.pocketworkstation.pckeyboard.SeekBarPreferenceString android:defaultValue="1.0" hk:minValue="0.5" - hk:maxValue="8.0" + hk:maxValue="100.0" hk:logScale="true" hk:asPercent="true" android:key="pref_label_scale"

In order to implement the change I had to download to android sdk and a couple of 32 bit libraries for Debian Wheezy — lib32stdc++6 and lib32z1. I had to work out how ant was supposed to work, as the Hacker’s Keyboardbuilding from source instructions included having to set up Mercurial and Eclipse. I only got as far as building a debug version, I guess if there is interest I could work out how to sign apks and release a proper version.

Once you have the source and all the libs installed you can just $ /path/to/android/sdk/tools/android update project -p . -t android-17 $ ant debug You should have an apk in the bin subdirectory if that worked. You could change the -t in the first command if you had a different Android release to mine.

Less hassle simply to download Hackers Keyboard with improved keyboard label scaling, though. Note, giving keyboard access to apps is potentially dodgy. I’ve not changed anything that could make Hackers Keyboard less secure, but if you are concerned about security you would be better to compile the code yourself. You will need to allow android to install software from untrusted sources in the configuration screen for this apk to work.


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