The slowkey application is a basic keyboard replacement for Android devices. It is not designed for rapid text input, but rather for accurate and deliberate text input. It clearly has no real use case, but that hasn't stopped any of the other projects available here. The images on the keys were reused from the SoftKeyboard project which comes as one of the samples provided with the Android SDK.
The master branch is generally several months behind development. For the latest bugs (features), guess which one of the other multitude of branches is actually active.
There are no dependencies for slowkey. All it requires is an extreme amount of patience, and misguided priorities.
Installing slowkey requires the Android SDK with the android executable on the path. Inside your slowkey checkout directory, type:
android update project --path .
This will generate the local.properties and proguard configuration required. The android update project command also provides you with other project configuration options, such as the target Android OS. For a full list of configuration options, consult the Android Developer Documentation.
slowkey has been written to operate on any 2.2 OS of Android (Froyo). However, it is possible to build slowkey for a different target OS. As mentioned above, using android update project is the approach to specify the target OS. In order to see a list of OS that your Android tools currently support, type:
android list targets
The output of this will provide each supported OS with an id. This id should be specified as the value for the --target parameter in the android update project command. E.g.
android update project --path . --target android-8
If you have configured your project correctly, then installation 'should' proceed. Installation and deployment to your system (connected device or running emulator) is achieved through the ant build tools. Specifically:
ant debug install
Generating a build requires all involved projects to have a valid build script. If this is not the case, you will commonly see this error:
sdk.dir is missing. Make sure to generate local.properties using 'android update project' or to inject it through an env var
As slowkey has no dependent projects, this error can only occur because slowkey itself has not been configured properly. The solution is to execute android update project with the relevant parameters for the slowkey project. A full guide to updating projects via the command line can be found here.