Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

One of Allegro and Calligrapher's main selling points have been their ability to keep you working in the dark, and this is now under serious threat with Thomas Ross's freeware NightKeys v2.00. Running on the Series 5 only, it's downloadable from the Neuon web site and has to be just about the most perfectly-implemented utility I've ever come across.

As you'll immediately guess from the screen shot, NightKeys is a hunt and peck on-screen keyboard for use when unable to type properly (i.e. in the dark, and hence the utility's name). Once started, the keyboard simply sends characters (lower, uppercase or symbol) to the foreground application. In tests, it worked well with all applications I tried it with (including the system screen) and enabled completely keyboard-less typing in the pitch dark.

There's usually no such thing as a free lunch, and you'll be looking for the catch right about now. Well, tough - have a bite on this free pizza and then drinks are on Neuon all afternoon. The original NightKeys utility was limited by OPL and couldn't handle pen taps in the main window without sending the keyboard itself to the background. The C++ code wizards at Neuon have worked their magic and NightKeys now behaves impeccably, staying in the foreground no matter what you tap on.

While they were at it, Thomas and Neuon have given the utility a complete overhaul. Dragging the keyboard to a screen edge minimises it to an icon in the toolbar (a very nice touch), obviously restoring when tapped on. Four different sizes of keyboard are now available, to suit all eyes and light conditions, and they've even written an excellent set of help screens. Uppercase letters and symbols are selected, as before, by tapping on the Shift button to cycle the character set shown on the keys. Everything is in its proper place on the 'virtual' Series 5 keyboard.

NightKeys is a must-have, worth a place on everybody's '5' for emergency use in the dark. If this is an example of what Neuon are capable of, I for one am going to hang on their every byte...

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