Improve the usability of the wide layout-shapes on smartphones
Currently, the wide shape is used (primarily) for both, smartphones held horizontally, and tablet-PCs. The wide shapes are designed to fit into a 16:5 area, which works well for tablet-PCs, but is not wide enough for comfortably typing with 2 thumbs on a wide smartphone held horizontally (with an aspect-ratio of 2:1 or even 20:9).
Squeekboard has a horizontal-stretching-function, which could be used to improve this, if it would behave like changing the actual button-sizes in the layout-files. Currently it stretches the symbols, while keeping their origin, which would make it look stretched and also make buttons labeled with words less readable. I will probably try to improve this soon. This could then also be used to fill empty space for the compact shapes, which generally should use all available space.
Another option would be, to add an option to either stretch or split a layout at defined points, and then move the buttons towards the borders of the display. Such functionality would have to be implemented first, though. This would be the best of these solutions, i think.
Yet another option would be, to add a third layout-shape with an aspect-ratio of 2:1; however, that would be more effort for every layout. This could probably be done for a Squeekboard-release in June; i would prefer one of the other improvements, though.
Related issues: