scim-googlepinyin is an SCIM port of google-pinyin on android platform. It's basically a translation from its original java code to C++ counterpart. Android google pinyin's core is not changed in porting, but this user interface is slightly modified to simulate the bevaviour of GooglePinyin on Windows.
I found lots of GNU/Linux users are long for the Google Pinyin for GNU/Linux. And Google is very generous to open source google-pinyin on android. So here it is. SCIM was chosed as the target platform because I use SCIM on a daily basis. Yes, ibus is way better than SCIM in term of compatibility. But I am not quite familiar with it's development yet.
scim-googlepinyin is not google-pinyin on andoird.
- Due to some limitation of SCIM platform (or GNU/Linux), some features are chopped off. Like
- inline edit
- predict according to inputted character (we are not able to tell what the text is before input cursor)
- predict based on the application we are inputting text to (no way to find out the app)
At the time of writing, android google-pinyin has release its version 1.1.3. While the code on android open souce project is obviously older than the latest version, which lacks some features like synchronize the user lemma with server. And there is legal issue to analyze the binary of android google-pinyin. So instead of reverse engineering, we need to find some other way to improve scim-googlepinyin.
- Google Pinyin for Windows sets a high bar for us. This software is not able to match with Google Pinyin for Windows in serveral ways. To name some major features we are missing:
- lacks a good/large enough language model. The size of IME's LM is around 10MiB while that of andoid google-pinyin is only 1.1MiB.
- the core engine used by android google pinyin may different from that of its Windows version
- no "i" mode support
- no English word input assistance
- not able to export/import user dict in text format
- no doodle or other eye candies