ScreenKeyboard

Customization will always remain a pillar of user experience, granting consumers the necessary leeway to mold the functionality of a program according to their needs. A great example is ScreenKeyboard, an accessible symbol insertion app that lets you create custom character layouts to fit your workflow, thus sparing you from scrolling through endless lists to find the right item.

Given its portable nature, the program lets users incorporate it into on-the-go setups for use on multiple devices without having to worry about lengthy installation wizards. Since its source code is freely available, those with programming experience can create a different version with custom modifications that suit their particular usage pattern, if deemed necessary.

Upon first boot, users are greeted to a clean and straightforward list of phonetic symbols that can come in handy for students following linguistics courses in their assignments. For a faster interaction process, clicking a character instantly inserts it into the actively selected text box or document instead of copying it to the clipboard, thus removing the need to manually paste it afterwards.

The app interface remains on top of opened windows to avoid overlay issues, and while the menu itself cannot be resized by dragging its edges with the cursor, the aspect ratio changes automatically to fit the number of entries provided by the currently active layout.

Where ScreenKeyboard shines most is in its support for highly customizable user-made layouts to fit your particular style of workflow or usage scenario. As such, apart from adding more symbols and Unicode elements, one can create a list with the most frequently used emoticons to have them ready for insertion when chatting with their friends instead of digging through the menus of the instant messaging platform’s proprietary character lists.

Moreover, online streamers have the option of building a text-reply equivalent of a soundboard while interacting with viewers, to save time when announcing interruptions or technical difficulties via pre-determined keywords or entire sentences instead of manually typing them. Finally, each entry button’s width, height and margin can be changed to fit the size of the word or sequence of characters, while changing the number of columns lets you customize the aspect ratio of the app.

Those in the market for a simple yet configurable character map application as an alternative to Window’s built-in feature can look no further than ScreenKeyboard’s support for custom ASCII databases that can help scholars, streamers and those with mobility issues access important keywords or symbols at the press of a mouse click.