2019-01-13 23:20:21

Hi,
I'm the developer of Narwhal, an appp which has been talked about here. Since some unverified, bad words have been said about it on this forum, I felt I should clarify things a bit.

Narwhal is an Android client for NVDA Remote, allowing you to control your windows pc from wherever you are, using an android phone with a keyboard:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta … ex.narwall
I recently made a tutorial for it, to make things easier:
https://youtu.be/TTXCoy182pU

Narwhal isn't open source, and no license obligations are in place, since I wrote it from scratch, without using any code from the NVDARemote addon. However, after making the initial release, Tyler and Chris did help me with a few important things, for which I'm grateful. Among these is making Narwhal work with NVDARemote.com. Older users may remember that it didn't work previously, which made them quite angry, since the alternative, configuring port forwards and dynamic dns isn't the easiest thing.

The in app purchases were only for donations, I never intended to make this thing paid. Actually I wrote it for myself and decided to publish it, in hope that it'll be useful to others. Donations were added because, surprisingly, people asked me for them. smile

The app works well on my phone. However, it seems i'ts buggy on others. It's quite hard for me to debug without direct access to the involved devices, but I'm doing my best. I recently implemented a bug reporting system to track down the issues.

I hope it'll be useful to some of you. If you have questions, feel free to ask.

2019-01-14 00:07:05

Thanks for this, it's a great app. I really hope you can immplement touch screen mapping in the near future, I'm the one who sent an email to you about this once.

2019-01-14 00:58:16

Glad to see you on the forum Stephan.
@nidza07: I think I remember hearing a thing or two about this being on the wire. Of course, talkback would throw a major wrench into everything since every planned swipe would have to be a two-finger gesture for the sake of passthrough, so that limits how many gestures you could otherwise have. I remember there being a hackers keyboard that had ctrl, windows and alt keys. I'm not sure if those can be passed through directly, whether stickykeys is on or off on the windows side. To that end, if it works, all one would have to do is install the hackers keyboard and they would have a fully working onscreen keyboard for the nvda remote.
As for the whole in-app purchase fiasco, that actually is not a problem with the app at all, but rather with the way Google Play policies work; the in-app purchase flag has to be applied before any in-app purchases can actually be implemented. The general paranoia surrounding in-app purchases is no isolated incident, dating back to when webviews would get hijacked with fake phishing popups, or the touch sensor being taken advantage of. I figured the developer was only looking for donation capability but would rather have it built in natively than having a paypal button, should users want to donate directly from their phone.

2019-01-14 01:59:30

Oh amazing idea jack, thanks for that. I think even blind accessibility keyboard had lots of windows keys. Maybe even the Google keyboard with the PC layout has some, should see if such things work now and hope they do. I personally don't care about talkback interfering though, once I am connected I would just turn talkback off and use the gestures.

2019-01-14 02:03:36

This is really cool! Does this work with other servers besides nvdaremote.com? Do you have plans to port this to iOS or do Apple's restrictions prevent this? I'd also love to have touch screen gestures as some point.

Grab my Adventure at C: stages Right here.

2019-01-14 02:15:34

IOS is probably not the best considering he'd have to pay $100 for a developer license (damn you, Apple.)
That being said, Chris it actually recently started working with nvdaremote.com. Now, you can either connect to that, or your own relay.

2019-01-14 02:41:01

Unfortunately keyboards with emulated keys wont work, at least blind accessibility keyboard didn't. If you press something like tab it moves the actual Android focus instead of passing the key through to the application. Quite unfortunate as I was hoping this would at least be an alternative.

2019-01-14 06:59:17

Well that's a drag. So I guess unless you have a Gemini or Cosmo Communicator ( a series of pda's from planet computers) with a built-in keyboard, you are stuck carrying one around. He could always put ctrl, windows, alt buttons on the screen. Obviously onscreen support would require talkback to be enabled, hence why text to speech is separate.

2019-01-15 14:45:26

How can I enable the edit  field to control the PC using blind accessibility keyboard?

2019-01-15 19:06:47

As far as I tested and said here, this wont work.

2019-01-17 19:31:17

i think you nead a ficical keyboard to control your computer using this app. because, i tried menny keyboard apps. nothing works. sorry for my english.

2019-01-18 06:43:31

Especially now, because the edit field is now irrelevant, and the key-grabber allows you to technically control nvda remote from anywhere by pressing f11 like we're all used to. This is what fixes android's infamous windows key and alt+tab problems that weren't really problems so much as hurdles to jump through for a fully keyboard-driven android remote experience.

2019-01-18 18:53:48

What I use is actually a foldable bluetooth keyboard, which when folded is smaller than my hone. Thicker, but in hight and width smaller.

But sometimes the world is better without sight...
Because You can see the world how it really is...
Dark.

2019-01-21 22:27:20 (edited by vortex1024 2019-01-21 22:28:30)

Hello,
I released version 1.14, which adds the right alt key and fixes some bugs.
Narwhal will never work with soft keyboards. It can't, because they don't consistently emmit key events. This is documented on the android development site:
https://developer.android.com/reference … w/KeyEvent
I also use a foldable keyboard, I have the entire power of my 8 core pc in my pocket. smile
It works with any relay server, including nvdaremote.com.
I don't have an iphone or a mac, so no ios.
Can't promise anything about the touchscreen mapping, this is a big feature, needing lots of time and planning.

2019-01-21 23:14:51 (edited by Chris 2019-01-21 23:15:25)

It's not a major deal. I can always get a USB OTG cable and connect a USB keyboard. This is really cool. I thought my GPD Win was cool, but this takes things to the next level. I assume this works over LTE?

Grab my Adventure at C: stages Right here.

2019-01-24 15:21:57

I didn't know about gpt win, cool idea! Actually I wanted to build something like this on my own, with an intel compute stick and a keyboard, if I wasn't able to build Narwhal. Fortunately I was, much more financially advantageous. smile

Of course, it works over any internet connection. The only difference you'll get is latency, which should be acceptable on LTE.

2019-01-24 20:47:24

The GPD Win is cool and of course NVDA Remote works on it. Then again, what's the point of controlling a super portable mini laptop from a cell phone? I suppose you can say because you can.

Speaking of the Compute Stick, is it possible to connect it to an HDMI audio extractor and use NVDA? That might make a nice low powered desktop PC that could of course be used with NVDA Remote and this app.

I still can't get over how awesome this is. If my compute stick idea works, I could take an Android phone and a keyboard everywhere I go and have access to Windows applications and features if I needed them. I essentially get my true dream of a pocket PC with LTE connectivity. The GPD Win comes really close, but it lacks LTE. sad

Grab my Adventure at C: stages Right here.

2019-01-25 01:47:19

Chris, that always exists in the form of the Planet Computers Gemini PDA. Clocking in at about the price of the average premium android phone, it is a modernized retro clamshell device that sure packs a punch.
https://topnewreview.com/planet-gemini-pda-review/

2019-01-25 02:04:42

By the way, very nice update, seems like all the bugs from before are corrected. Connections are incredibly stable now.

2019-01-25 02:14:28

It just occurred to me that I don't think IOS would even be a remote possibility for an app like this, considering that the keyboard hook for this thing is an accessibility service. Teamviewer probably has an underlying engine for this (ironically, I never actually used Teamviewer with anything but the onscreen keyboard on ios and they had actual screen buttons to send windows key commands across the network. IOS would probably never allow the system-level key hook that allows nvda remote keyboard control to be truly system-wide. Wonder if that's gonna finally be the thing that pushes blindly-following IOS-lovers over to Android? Lol.

2019-01-29 20:51:49

Chris, I meant using a GPT Win, or a compute stick with a keyboard, to control a powerful windows pc, offering very portable high performance computing and removing the need for a laptop. Since we're blind, why take a big screen with us? All we need is sound and a keyboard. Android latency is the only left thing bothering me, guess I need a pixel.
Thanks for your appreciation. That's exactly what I thought when deciding to develop the app. smile

Actually, Jack, posting Narwhal to play store is one of my ways of promoting Android. People always ask me why I don't use ios. Now, my app is the third argument, after the price and eloquence. smile
I'm happy it now works for you. Indeed, I haven't noticed any crashes in the last days. This means either that no one uses the app, or that it doesn't crash. smile
I learnt a lot from this experience, mainly that android phones are very different, and that testing should be done by users, not the developers of the app. I knew the last   one, but sadly ignored it.

2019-01-30 00:04:49

The one thing I'm going to test if I can is this app's possible compatibility with the chrome os substitute for Android. I don't think there should be a problem, though the accessibility service for the key grabber may be a thing to stand in our way (given the sandbox nature of Android apps on Chrome OS.)

2019-02-02 00:20:17

good idea. let me know if the accessibility service doesn't work, I can enable the old, less efficient key interceptor for chrome os. Guess i'ts better than nothing.

2019-02-02 01:46:14

Mode selector switch would probably be good in that regard, as you could switch between the two, or the key interceptor could be what it falls back to if it detects that the accessibility service is not or cannot be enabled.

2019-02-22 16:36:38

So, good news and bad news. Good news? Narwhal works with the Android subsystem on the pixelbook. So now you can control your workstation from your portable machine if you so desire.
But, Stephan, it looks like you are gonna have to find an alternative keyboard shortcut in addition to f11 that will toggle between remote control and the operating system. The top row on the Pixelbook doesn't appear to function as a function row.
Hopefully this could be worked out in a future revision, otherwise it is great to be able to control my pc from my pixelbook.