1. PanALEX's Way to Say "I Love You!"
wo<space>ai<space>ni!
As you hit <space> key, you will see the popup choice list along the way, but you do not have to worry about it for now because the first choice is already what you need. This example illustrates the simple character input.
2. PanALEX's way to say "World Trade Center"
shi<space>8jie<space>2mao<space>4yi<space>8zhong<space>xin<space>
In this example, each hit of <space> key popup a choice palette, and you just have to select the correct answer by following up with the numeric key (numeric key is also the label of the choice on the palette). Whenever you see the choice list palette, you can also navigate through the choices with the (left/right/up/down) array keys and try to find your desired character/phrase. From above, <space> is probably the most important key for PanALEX. But above keystrokes are definitely too much, and PanALEX can do it much better:
shijie<space>maoyi<space>zhongxin
This example illustrates the phrase aided input, where you simply type phrase by phrase: world_trade_center. This will work best when you have all the phrases handy in your current dictionary. But we can still further simplify the input by segment phrase lookup:
sj<space>3my<space>2zx<space>5
In above example, we use the first letter of each Chinese character, shi-jie goes to sj, mao-yi goes to my and zhongxin goes to zx, then each <space> key invokes a lookup of character/phrase, we use numeric key to select the phrase from choice list.