Automatic pop up kbd

Chris Lord chris at openedhand.com
Fri May 16 16:31:57 CEST 2008


Hi all,

On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 21:26 +1000, Carsten Haitzler wrote:
> On Fri, 16 May 2008 11:02:03 +0100 Andy Powell <openmoko at automated.it> babbled:
> 
> > On Friday 16 May 2008 10:46, Carsten Haitzler wrote:
> > > On Fri, 16 May 2008 10:33:13 +0100 Andy Powell <openmoko at automated.it> 
> > babbled:
> > > > Please can you make it possible to switch this off and / or
> force the
> > > > keyboard to hide. There's nothing worse than having an external
> keyboard
> > > > connected and being forced to waste screen real estate on
> something you
> > > > don;t need.
> > >
> > > design decision was made to remove manual control even though it
> has been
> > > there from the beginning. no can do.
> > 
> > is that code for 'someone just decided it shouldn't be there, we all
> said it 
> > should but they just told us to get rid of it'?
> 
> no comment :)

I initially wrote the multitap-pad with no instruction or input from
anyone (I'd noticed that no one had any interest in creating a sane
input method for a phone and figured one would eventually be necessary):
http://chrislord.net/blog/Software/multitap-pad.enlighten

With that in mind, it's not a case of "someone just decided it shouldn't
be there, we all said it should but they just told us to get rid of
it'?", it's a case of "no one actually designated anyone to work on an
input method, or if they did, that work was never done".

In my opinion, I have no idea why you'd ever want to manually
enable/disable the input, unless some other design issue was causing
this wish. To back me up, I'll point out that zero touch-screen phones
have the ability to manually disable automatic input-method display.

This is just my opinion though. There's no technical reason that makes
this hard, however - the code for the multi-tap pad is very few lines
and pretty simple stuff
( http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/misc/trunk/multitap-pad/src/multitap-pad-main.c ), instead of complaining about decisions being made that conflict with your wishes, you could focus that energy on writing a patch.

If I were to write this patch, I'd suggest adding a boolean gconf key,
something like '/desktop/poky/interface/auto_show_im' and add the
necessary code in multitap-pad-main.c to listen to this key. This would
require very few additions to the code (of course, adding some interface
to configure this option and so on is another issue).

Hope that helps explain a few things.

--Chris

p.s. Not having a button on the actual keypad to hide the pad was an
oversight, however, that should probably be there...





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