Terminal for ASU

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:05:48 +0100 Stroller <stroller at stellar.eclipse.co.uk>
babbled:

> 
> On 21 Jul 2008, at 19:47, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
> > ...
> > the problem is the designers decided that ASU is not to have any  
> > manual
> > keyboard toggle button because it will disturb the design and/or  
> > confuse users,
> > so all apps and toolkits need modification to talk a "protocol" to  
> > bring up the
> > keyboard on demand (no manual controls). that is why you need to do  
> > this.
> > personally i think you need a manual control because, as such, many  
> > apps and
> > toolkits will not be changed, or they will get it wrong and give  
> > you a keyboard
> > when you don't want one, or decide not to give you one when you  
> > do... but
> > that's not my call.
> 
> Hi Carsten,
> 
> Sorry to trouble you, but who are these designers, please?

i'll let them speak up if they wish to be part of a debate on this. it's up to
them. i am not one way or another here. not going to defend or dob-in. i have
no vested interests one way or another. i have technical reasons why i think the
move to remove any such manual control is a bad thing and have made them clear
often enough. i am not going to get into it again. i am staying neutral - i
have my professional opinions and personal ones, but my job is to implement
what is designed by others to the best of my ability - if something is
technically not possible or utterly infeasible - i can't do it, but removing a
manual keyboard button is perfectly easy to do, and so it gets done.

if i hadn't made it clear.. i am being neutral on this - i am simply stating
the facts as they are. i am not wanting to beat anyone one over this. i am
just  stating facts. emotions and opinions thereafter are entirely those of
people as they wish to express them - they were not intended or written here.
just sticking to facts.

> I think  many of us would like to contribute to the ASU, seeing as  
> how it's the future of Openmoko, so this would appear to be a  
> limitation upon community contributions.

as such we are paid by openmoko to do what  we are told to do by the design
department and that is what we then do. you in the community can go and do your
own themes and patches and packages and do what u want.

> Where are the design documents which say "no keyboard toggle button  
> should be included", please? If one wishes to contribute code or  
> patches to ASU then I guess it's necessary to know this, or one will  
> find patches rejected because they don't meet this design specification?

well design documents are pretty thin on the ground. i was told so in
email/irc directly to do this. i had a manual button there originally and was
explicitly told to remove it. i argued that this was a bad move for many
technical reasons (porting of apps such as SDL games that don't use gtk or qt
that now all need modifications, i listed the apps it will break, the reasoning
of not always wanting a virtual keyboard (ie an entry box may be focused, but
you just want to READ the content, not edit) etc. etc.) but it was made
entirely clear that the button had to go - arguments or not. as i remember the
reasons being that "it cluttered the interface", was "confusing", "unnecessary"
and that "all applications can be modified to talk the protocol anyway". or
something to that effect. this was a while ago so i'm a little hazy on the
reasons - but it was something like that.

again - i'm neutral. i'm just a programmer. i just implement code.

-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>