Comment 8 for bug 1522157

I got kind of sad after updating to OTA-9 yesterday. I designed the keyboard and I agree it might seem random because it's not qwerty but I put in a lot of effort into improving the Icelandic keyboard which never really got any love but was a slight modification of the Danish one even if we have more letters. I might have taken it too far but I just decided to jump on the chance after I got it.

Here are a few of the changes I wanted and did incorporate:

* I wanted the accented characters like é ý ú í ó and á to be as close to being "first class citizens" as possible, e.g. é which shares a key with the number 3 means I have to press and hold e and then drag finger to get é instead of just long pressing (which would normally give me 3). The letter é is used far more in Icelandic than the number 3.
* I wanted English letters that are not frequently used in Icelandic like q w z and c to not take up so much screen space. (I ended up grouping them into two keys). A mobile keyboard is very small and having very infrequently used characters take up a whopping 4 keys didn't make sense. Instead we had to hide more frequently used characters like ö and ó behind o.
* I wanted to better fit characters like ð and þ on the keyboard (they look like an afterthought on the Android keyboard: "Oh no, we forgot þ, let's just put it here next to the space bar").
* I then wanted to move the most frequent letter in the alphabet "a" to a place on the keyboard where I don't have to bend my finger very awkwardly to press it, i.e. "a" should be closer to the middle.

That's when I realised I would have to redesign the keyboard and I rearranged all keys with the above in mind so I just drew up a keyboard more aligned with "thumb-typing" than normal finger positioning and the output was the Icelandic "mobile" keyboard (a mobile dvorak if you'd like).

I've been using it since it got released last summer and been loving it (I'm typing faster with less pain in my fingers).

I've showed it off at a few presentations I've given and explained it. In fact it was a nice anecdote for talks because the only open data corpus I could get my hands on was speeches from the Icelandic parliament so the keyboard is actually the most political keyboard in the word (with word suggestions based on parliamentary speech: I jokingly say I now call my wife "Esteemed wife").

So I'm sad with this change and it's even worse because the accented characters like á are not even close to be easy to select on in the longpress menu.

Would it be possible to resubmit my version as "Icelandic mobile" or something?