Virtual Keyboard for Google Chrome™

About

Virtual Keyboard for Google Chrome™ will popup automatically when the user clicks on an input field such as textboxes and textareas. Futhermore, the keyboard will disappear automatically once no longer needed.

This extension is ideal for touch screen devices. This keyboard works like an iOS/Android/Windows 8 touch virtual keyboard.

For more details visit: http://apps.xontab.com/VirtualKeyboard/

Known Limitations

Due to security reasons, communication between frames is restricted in Google Chrome. The only way to enable the keyboard in cross-origin iFrame scenarios, you need to disable web security using a flags --disable-web-security --disable-site-isolation-trials --user-data-dir=/tmp. Warning, these flags make a Chrome browser very vulnerable.

Future versions

Planned features are:

• Better support with WebComponents, Angular 1, 2+ and React
• Add support to HTML ContentEditable
• More Keyboard layouts
• More developer options
• Refactoring and Documenation

You can also suggest new features: https://apps.xontab.com/Suggest/VirtualKeyboard/

Brainlab Fork

About the Brainlab fork

The Brainlab fork of this plugin adds patches to make it kiosk mode friendly.

Additional sources

For automating the generation of the crx file, the crx3.proto file was added. This file originates from the CRX3-Creator project and is distributed under the MIT License quoted in LICENSE.crx3. For more details please visit:

https://github.com/pawliczka/CRX3-Creator

Version tagging

As this is a fork, but we also have to define version numbers, we introduce an extra convention for Brainlab created versions. The version numbering must adhere the rules for chrome extensions, see Manifest - Version.

major.minor.patch.brainlab

Where:

• major.minor.patch refers to the version of the upstream project on which we are based upon
• brainlab refers to a version indicator for brainlab changes

Example:

1.12.8.0 - the first brainlab release based upon upstream 1.12.8

Also we use the manifest field version_name to describe the version with a short string:

  "version": "1.12.8.0",
  "version_name": "1.12.8 brainlab release 0"

CRX file generation

The crx generation is automated by scripts.

For local development - while using the Yocto SDK to provide the toolchain binaries - please execute the generate.sh wrapper script.

For compiling the crx file from within yocto, please run generate-crx.sh while recreating the sysroot from the wrapper script via yocto.

A word on signing keys

During creation the crx file must be signed. We use a disposable temp key file for this, as we are not planning to distribute this plugin publically. See generate-crx.sh for details.