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

[Chris Leonard]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 11:10 AM, Gary Martin
<garycmartin at googlemail.com> wrote:

>> I like the most recent version well enough,
>>
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Maliit_Sugar_theme_work_13.png
>
> High praise ;) Improvements/changes?

Sorry, I did not mean to "damn with faint praise", it is really good
work under very tight restrictions.  I personally find the XO physical
kb limiting, so I bought a rollable rubber USB kb :-)

I am sincerely excited about the potential for an OSK in the realm of
limitless i18n/L10n freed from the shackles of silkscreening.

>> 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 unlikely for this cycle).

Yes, the ergonomics of frame invocation/dismissal and switching focus
from kb to other touch input needs deep thought, but I have confidence
in the people smarter in UI design than I am that will be working on
it. :-).  I don't expect it to be tuned to re-training fossils like
me, but at the agile minds and fingers of kids.

>> 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!

Ok, you asked for it :-)

>> 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).
>

Getting the existing OLPC xkb designs recreated is going to be pretty
important once the existing Maliit layouts are adapted.  It's also
going to be a repetitive task (see attached spreadsheet), I'm
wondering if there are hackerish methods for assisting in that task
(scripts, spreadsheet templates, etc.)?  Even the list of OLPC xkb
layouts in my spreadsheet is incomplete, for example, I know of a
layout for an Inuktitut variant that Walter helped some Canadians
design.

Generating some local documentation on de novo Maliit keyboard design
is going to pretty important as I can easily imagine getting asked a
lot of questions about this that can no longer be put off with, "well,
first you make a silkscreen in a factory in China. . . "

I'd love to be able to do more for new languages than say go look at
https://wiki.maliit.org/Documentation and let me know when you've
figured out their process.  Sugar Labs is, by it's nature, an entry
point for languages under-represented in ICT and we already do a lot
of stuff (like glibc locale design assistance) in support of  these
language communities.


Language switching:
So, with the "language switch key" you can toggle through a stack of
keyboards that you've configured in the Control Panel (in advance).
All by itself, that would be awesome and really enhance multilingual /
multi-script input.

This more-or-less implements the Language key already found on Arabic
and Thai OLPC keyboards, but does so for all keyboards.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Keyboard#Special_Keys

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Arabic_Keyboard
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:Key_arabic.jpg

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Thai_Keyboard
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:Key_thai.jpg

This also seems to be necessary, but not sufficient, for the utopian
ideal of toggling through UI languages / glibc locales on-the-fly
(without going to Control Panel and rebooting).  How far away is such
a promised land once we have keyboard switching?

cjl
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