Richard Leggett on New Media

Something I forgot to upload a while back.

This "component" allows the user to enter text with T9 (non-predictive) text input without having to use the cursor keys and select to give focus to the textfield, i.e. tapping the 2 key will cycle through "a", "b", "c", "2" and wait a second for it to advance to the next character in the string. Simple concept that we now take for granted on phones, Macromedia created a Flash Lite 1.1 version which did the same thing although this one was a lot easier to make having to modify that for an FL1.1 app just recently (kudos for the major effort that must have been put in there)!

Feel free to download the source to use as-is. Simply call myInlineField.setFocus(true); to activate user input. I feel strongly about the way users have to tab to textfields and then press enter to begin text input in Flash Lite and would rather not have the extra step of pressing enter/select, or take a game-alike philosophy where-ever possible using the inline field. For things like forms on the other hand the existing system works fine. I'll take some time to improve this later, instead of a cursor flashing it should display a carat in the textfield and so on...

Also, I'll be uploading a full Flash Lite 2.0 app with source in the next few days so look out