G1 has hit the market, and since typing on a touchscreen is still a pretty unpretty thing, I decided to build my own softkeyboard. Doing so is not possible with the current SDK downloadable from the android site, but you can ( not easily.. ) build all the required libs ( mainly android.jar ) using the sdk source and even use the adt 0.8 eclipse-plugin. Even though it confronts you with some errors, hitting ok will do the job.

Android features the ability to select your preferred input service, enabling a developer to create a custom keyboard from scratch. android.inputmethodservice seems to be the entry-point for any such efforts, and I will keep you up-to-date here on how it works. And how it doesn’t.