[Sugar-devel] [Design] On Screen Keyboard – part of the 'get Sugar touch ready' feature set

[Gary Martin]

Hi Chris,

On 23 Aug 2012, at 05:56, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 9:09 PM, Gary Martin <garycmartin at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
>> The key layout is a more complicated affair as it requires modification of XML files for each language layout [1], so I'd rather lock down an agreed layout before I start trying to apply them to 40+ different languages – and yes I plan to script the edits as far as I can ;) FWIW, looks like this will be a patch set we need to apply to out builds as although maliit supports custom styles (olpc-xo is the one they added for us), their layouts are shared between all styles, so they would be unlikely to accept patches from us wanting to modify them all for Sugar's needs.
>> 
>> [1] https://gitorious.org/maliit/maliit-plugins/trees/master/maliit-keyboard/data/languages
> 
> I like the most recent version well enough,
> 
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Maliit_Sugar_theme_work_13.png

High praise ;) Improvements/changes?

> I'm a little concerned that the absence of the
> Home/Friends/Neighborhood/World quartet of XO specific keys will be
> missed, but I understand that it is tough to collapse 6 rows of XO
> keys into 4 rows for Maliit.

Yes space is at a premium using an OSK [1], however as the OSK is only visible when a text input widget has focus, we need to make sure Neighborhood/Group/Home/Activity/Journal are accessible at all other times as well, primarily by improving touch access to the Frame (and improving Frame discovery, though unlkely for this cycle).

> I've got lots of other questions, but they are more i18n related, so
> I'll forego inserting them into this design thread,

No, bring them up here if they are OSK related!

> but I can't resist
> throwing one out there.
> 
> Is there currently a mechanism for re-creating the many xkb-based
> layouts already designed for OLPC that never got silkscreened?
> 
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Keyboard_layouts

No, those are physical layouts not designed for OSK. There about 40 existing maliit layouts that I'll update to match our OSK design modifications. And then I'd imagine we will want to closely check the OSK layouts for the languages we prioritise, and make sure they cover our needs (the existing OLPC layouts will be a useful reference).

Thanks for the feedback!

Regards,
--Gary

[1] 8-10mm per touch target is about as small as you want to go for key hit targets, and we are at 9.5mm in portrait for the v13 layout example (assuming the current XO screen dimensions).

> 
> cjl