InputMethodKit Backporting Component, or IMK-Tiger for short, helps input method developers backport their IMK-based input method apps to OS X 10.4 Tiger. It is what we use to backport the latest OpenVanilla, a popular input method toolset in Taiwan, to 10.4.
You can find the deprecated project archive at:
http://code.google.com/p/imk-tiger/
Notes:
- Original author is Lukhnos D. Liu.
- Documentation is written by Zonble.
- Certain useless comments are sanitized in order to let this repository legally hostable on Gitee and GitLab China.
A summary:
OS X 10.5 introduced InputMethodKit (IMK), arguably the best OS-level input method framework in the industry. IMK is pure Cocoa and greately simplifies input method development with a client-server design, powered by Objective-C's distributed object mechanism. Input method developers only need to talk to a very slim and object-oriented interface to provide input method service to OS X. This allows developers to concentrate on algorithms and user experience. On other platforms, OS X 10.4 included, input method development involves many platform-specific details and debugging headaches that can be a big distraction.
There is a catch--IMK is Leopard-only. In a market like Taiwan, where Traditional Chinese is the main written language, there are still 45%-55% of users having their Tiger machines around, and this is a market we want to continue supporting.
What if we could replicate IMK on Tiger? In fact we can and have. IMK-Tiger is the result. We're now working on an IMK-based OpenVanilla, and using IMK-Tiger to build the Tiger version.
Please find the details in the project home mentioned above. We have supplied a sample project, with a working, IMK-based input method ("SimpleIME") and necessary project settings to produce a TSM-based counterpart.
Note that we call it a backporting component, not a library, because it is not as trivial as linking to a library and voilà. But the crux is to customize IMK-Tiger's ComponentConfig.h so that the TSM component provided can establish connection to your IMK server process (and launch it if it hasn't). But once you have finished knitting everything together, you can concentrate on improving your IMK-based code.
For now IMK-Tiger doesn't support -[IMKInputController recognizedEvents:] and -[IMKInputController currentKeyboardLayout], and you must implement -[IMKInputController handleEvent:client:] to handle the keyboard event.
IMK-Tiger is open source released under the BSD License. Feedback and participation are welcome and appreciated.
Thanks!