Google Summer of Code 2014 is about to end and next Monday is the official pencils-down date in which our students should stop producing code. Fortunately, I’m proud to announce my mentee, Raniere Da Silva, has released his LaTeX Keyboard for Math in the Firefox OS Marketplace. Notice you need Firefox OS 2.0 or greater to use it.
The keyboard includes:
- Five layouts for a default English input, numbers and symbols, greek letters (with uppercase variations), functions and operators.
- The common forms of functions and operators contain alternatives for less common variations of themselves.
- An input assistant to automatically enter and leaving LaTeX math contexts.
- Placeholder navigation between LaTeX math commands.
I think the work has been positive for a bunch of reasons: first it’s a fully functional keyboard taking advantage of custom keyboards in Firefox OS 2.0, this is quite an interesting new feature of the new version of the OS. Second, the project enabled Raniere to be part of the Firefox OS core development community and inspired discussion and opinion among the owners, peers and maintainers of the keyboard demonstrating again Mozilla is worried about attending the concerns of the community and empowering them to contribute with what they think is the best. And third, what I consider it was an important point for the project success, we managed to focus on a self-contained user case without deviations or digressions: the LaTeX input, properly adjusting the scope of the entire project and pushing for functionality without neglecting code compatibility (it’s our intention to land the Math layout into the Firefox OS core), code quality and software QA.
Yesterday I talked to Raniere, I want to repeat it was a pleasure to work with him and to participate in GSoC. I want to thank Mozilla as well to allow me to participate as mentor inside its organization despite being a third party collaborator.
You can review all the hard work in his GSoC entries on the blog Minhas Eloquências (in English).
Uno + uno = diez 