Can someone recommend a good and i18n screen keyboard?

[JoTo]

Dear DC fellas,

i'm in need of a good on-screen keyboard under windows to use with touchscreens. It could be a standalone app and/or (preferable) a SDK, LIB or class library for c++ and MSVC.

Freeware, Shareware, Donationware, Commercialware, WhatDoIKnowWare is all acceptable. But it should at least fit the following needs:

• Royality free (Commercial purchase is OK, but then it should be freely distributable to any amount of customers without additional fees)
• Must support UTF-8 and all i18n charsets and keyboard layouts or at least should be customizable to do so. That means beside the "normal" standards like QWERTY/QWERTZ, iso-8859-1, iso-8859-2 and such even more exotic charsets and keyboard layouts like simplified chinese, russian, hebrew, vietnamese, ... should be supported.
• Customization is very welcome so we can e.g. hide unused buttons we don't need and will only distract the user.
• Design customization to match our app design would be nice, but isn't a no-go if it can't be done.
• Stable, reliable and precise functionality for use in a medical environment (doctors office, hospital, ...)
• If its a standalone app, some way of communication must be possible (show/hide, maybe redirect input to our app, whatever).

Anyone has already any experience with such kind of software and can recommend a product or a list of maybe interesting candidates?

Any hint appreciated to sort out the gazillions of this kind apps out there.

Thankyou in advance very much for your assistance.

Greetings
JoTo

[Renegade]

What kind of development are you doing? There are APIs for that in mobile platforms. Tablet?

If you're doing a kiosk, then that's different again. (Try the Windows 98 avenue as it was still popular for kiosks when I looked into it a few years ago.)

As you say medical environment, I'm guessing Windows 2000+.

I've not used an on-screen keyboard, but I probably know a few people who have and could ask for you.

[Ath]

Isn't the On Screen Keyboard of Windows Vista/Windows 7 enough? Don't know about the customizations though. (Not mentioned in the OP as unwanted)

[JoTo]

Hi Buddies,

@Renegade:
No, no tablet (yet). Normal Laptop/Desktop PCs with full sized Touchscreens. And yes, its a mix of Kioskmode and normal operation, as our app runs in Fullscreen mode, but let other applications (e.g. the x-ray scanner GUIs and so on) pop up if needed.

Used OSes are XP/Vista/7.

What is Win98-Avenue? I may Google for it. But the name won't let me jump in ecstasy when i read Win98  . But i'll search for it. Thank you.

If you can tap anyone of your environment and extract any useful information for this topic, i'd gladly appreciate your effort.

@Ath: Yes, Win7 built in screen keyboard came to mind too. But as you said, a bit inflexible. If we can't find our prince, we have to kiss that frog of course. But as this is not a thing we need tomorrow (but next week ) i can wait a bit longer if another one maybe comes up with another suggestion. Thank you anyway very much.

Any more suggestions? I'm still in "search and collect mode"

TIA again!
Greetings
JoTo

[Renegade]

Perhaps this component:

http://www.softwaretoolbox.com/vboard/html/vboard-net.html

I've not tried it, but it looks decent. Worth looking into anyways.

Or a Flex component:

http://www.kerkness.ca/flex-on-screen-qwerty-keyboard-component/

I wouldn't be all warm & fuzzy about that though. Integrating there might be more of a pain than it's worth.

You could probably build one fairly easily yourself. I'd likely go with a component though as it's faster & easier.

From MS:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms971323

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms717415.aspx

[JoTo]

Hi Renegade,

thank you very much for your suggestions.

I'll look at all your given links.

Greetings
JoTo