CiviKey aims to offer a free virtual keyboard of professional quality ('free' must be understood in the sense of the freedom of the Open Source).

Technically speaking, the main challenge is to provide developers and designers of keyboards a work environment that facilitates their work. Key points are:
A single model of keyboard that handles fundamental aspects of a keyboard:

1. Keys: keys hold basic properties such as being pressed or released.
2. Zones: keys are grouped into functional areas called zones. Example: the numeric keypad, function keys, etc. which can be freely defined.
3. Modes: actual keys are associated to modes that generalize the effect of keys such as "Ctrl", "Shift", of physical keyboards but can be freely defined ( "Fridge", "Excel", etc.).
4. Layouts: a keyboard can define any number of graphical layouts.
5. These objects (Context, Key, Zone, Layout, etc.) provide a set of events that enables a complete decoupling of the architecture (Model/View).
6. These objects define minimal properties: most of the actual properties (like the color of a key for instance) are under the control of Plugins

Complete externalization of the functionalities thanks to a Plugin system:
1. Plugins can be enabled, disabled, started or stopped as needed (this mimics Windows Services behavior).
2. A Plugin is configured globally and manages its own parameters for potentially any object of a Context (this is close to the Attached Properties mechanism of Windows Presentation Framework).
3. Plugins can consume and expose Services (Services are simple interfaces that are dynamically "proxyfied") to other Plugins. Bindings between consumers and implementations are automatically handled by the kernel.

Requirements:
* Net framework

The license of this software is Free, you can free download and free use this mouse & keyboard software.