Myanmar IT Resources: Making of KeyMagic 1.5

Making of KeyMagic 1.5

Author: mmITres Genre: » Windows

Rating

I was being busy by working on a new version of KeyMagic 1.5 these days and nights ( sleepless nights

). KeyMagic 1.5′s whole GUI is re-written in C#. GUI would be look nice on Vista and later as I used new DWM‘s features, the aero glasses. Look the pic.

More important than GUI is 1.5 supports both 32bit and 64bit where 1.4 is not but KeyMagicTS works for both too. And hooking is now Low Level Keyboard hooks so no crash will be occurred even if there is error in KeyMagic input processor. And input processor now works in .NET wrapped libkeymagic which mean more good error handling. Starting from 1.5, I used libkeymagic so we can expect same typing experience with other platforms. If you don’t know yet, libkeymagic is used in Mac, Linux and iOS.

If you look carefully on above pic. You will see keyboard list with FileName, DisplayText, Hotkey, Version, Description columns. When new keyboard layout is installed, DisplayText, Hotkey, Version, Description are grabbed from keyboard layout. And look Version column, you will see many version which means 1.5 continue to supports lower version of keyboard layouts. Anyway, version 1.3 don’t contain such information about Hotkey, Icon. You can also disable keyboard layouts if you don’t want.

And something big, which is missing in previous of KeyMagic, is Soft keyboard/(On-screen keyboard). Soft Keyboard is fully featured, you can resize and drag anywhere you want and yes with an attractive UI with Aero

On the pic, It is showing layout for Zawgyi L-Unicode which has switch key. Switch key are showing with Blue color. Look down, there are more colors. Orange when CapsLock is on and Gray when key is down.