1998 - 2000 Project Text Entry Client Phone.com Tasks design & build Tools C Solution pluggable editing behaviors

Text Entry for Cellphones

Phone.com builds the de facto standard Internet web browsers for cell phones. Their browser is now used in more cell phones, in more countries, than any other. With this success came a difficult problem: How do you support text entry in a uniform manner with so many different cell phones and so many languages?

Phone.com asked Glyphic to rethink the problem and architect a text entry sub-subsystem that would support them through the future. We synthesized the disparate elements and created a system that would support pluggable features. We constructed an API and a porting kit so that Phone.com could easily support different features for phones from different manufacturers in multiple markets.

By further restructuring the code, we enabled Phone.com to easily include or exclude various features and optimizations as needed, while always maintaining the smallest possible code footprint possible. (In cellphones, small is good.) Lastly, we were able to do all this while maintaining a software interface to the rest of Phone.com's software that was completely shielded from the customizations each phone needed.

The result was a compact implementation that was flexible enough to handle a variety of text entry techniques, while remaining a consistent interface to the rest of Phone.com's software. Glyphic was able to do this by looking not just at not just the immediate needs of the client, but also the overall positioning this software had in the client's business.