Keyman Update for 15 March 2024

This blog reports on significant Keyman product and keyboard development updates over the period from 3 February 2024 — 15 March 2024. This is a much longer cycle than normal, and we hope to return to our regular 2-weekly posting cycle next week!

As always, you can follow all of our development online at github.com/keymanapp/keyman, and you may find the Keyman Development Status Site at status.keyman.com both interesting and slightly overwhelming!

Keyman minor releases

Keyman 16.0.146 stable and 16.0.147 stable were released in this cycle. These updates included some minor maintenance updates:

• Android: Added a more detailed data privacy policy page to meet Google Play requirements (#10987)
• Firstvoices Keyboards app: updated keyboard version metadata (#10638)
• Web: Fixed a problem with a script error that occurred on focus changes (#10747)
• iOS: Updated sample projects so that they would build without Keyman repository source required (#10940)

In the 17.0 series, Keyman 17.0.259 alpha through 17.0.267 alpha were also released in this cycle, and Keyman 17.0.268 beta through 17.0.288 beta.

Significant updates in these versions include:

• The release to 17.0 beta. Read more in our detailed blog post
• Many bug fixes and loose ends tidied up (both pre-beta and during the beta cycle)
• Documentation for new features (#10726, #10768, #10764, #10763, #10808, #10796, #10854, #10842, #10783, #10858, #10856, #10917, #10921, #10922, #10923, #10924, #10985, #10839, #10841, and many others!)
• kmc message command (#10888)

The full list of updates can be viewed in the version history.

Keyboard updates

• A new keyboard for Ife is now available as an experimental release, thank you to @MattGyverLee (#2524)
• A new keyboard for Yoruba is now available, Yorùbá Ìrọ̀rùn (#2559)
• A new experimental keyboard for Kashmiri is now available. Kashmiri Phonetic keyboard layout for the Kashmiri language. This keyboard works best with a US Qwerty keyboard and is based on a phonetic layout. This is a work in progress. Suggested improvements are welcomed. (#2563, #2565)
• A new Experimental keyboard for Shebek. This keyboard is designed for typing Shebek in the Arabic script. The orthography is still in development. Some characters from a standard Arabic keyboard that are not required by Shebek have been added to the right-alt keyboard layers. (#2562)
• An initial submission of knyaw keyboard, for Karen Language. (#2575, #2579)
• New lexical model “Khmer Google Crawler”. This is a wordlist from Google Corpus Crawler. After cleaning up the data using Khmer Encoding Normalizer, there are 17,752 entries. (#240, #241)
• The EuroLatin (SIL) keyboard has a major new release, version 3.0, which adds flick gesture support and rearranges the punctuation and symbol layers to be more logical. Flick gestures are available now in the Keyman 17.0 beta release, a major usability improvement! (#2520, #2599)
• The FirstVoices Project published a number of significant keyboard updates, with thanks largely to @HopsandHops:
  • Háiɫzaqvḷa keyboard, version 9.5: Corrected language spelling, updated info and keys (#2535)
  • Nsilxcən keyboard, version 9.3: Added missing key and characters (#2540)
  • Dënesųłıné keyboard, version 10.0.1: Corrected which desktop keyboard the mobile was packaged with (#2537)
  • Anishinaabemowin keyboard, version 10.0.1: New desktop layout, updated mobile layout (#2541)
  • Cree – Roman Orthography keyboard, version 10.0: New desktop layout, updated documentation to reflect this (#2536)
  • Gitxsanimx̱-Gitsenimx̱-Gyaanimx̱ keyboard, version 10.0.1: Updated name, mobile layout (#2552)
  • Éy7á7juuthem keyboard, version 10.0: new desktop layout (#2566)
  • Dakelh keyboard, version 9.1.5: Normalised, cleaned up rules, centered mobile keyboard (#2574)
  • K’áshogot’ı̨nę́ Yatı̨́ keyboard, version 10.0: New desktop build, QOL updates (#2573)
• The hcesar keyboard was updated to version 1.1.1. The hcesar keyboard layout, also called “teclado nacional”, was used by typewriters sold in Portugal from 1937 until the 1980s. (#2547, #2580)
• The Indic Romanization from ITRANS keyboard was updated to version 1.2.0, adding a rule to output U+2019 when type U+0027 (‘) twice (#2546)
• The BJCreeUNI (east) keyboard was updated to version 9.2.0, fixing a bug related to previous change to NFD (#2564)
• GFF Sheek Bakrii Saphaloo keyboard was updated to version 1.0.6, with revisions to the input terminator symbol, ‘ (apostrophe), and a font update (#2577), credit to @dyacob
• The English nrc.en.mtnt word list has been updated to version 0.3.1 with a major refresh of the words in the list, and so that correction-searching now ignores quotes, apostrophes (#221, #244)