ASU software - pre-pre-release impressions

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Mon, 19 May 2008 10:27:25 -0400 Ian Darwin <ian at darwinsys.com> babbled:

> 2) The ASU software features a qwerty-keyboard. It is switchable between
> alphabetics and numerics; unfortunately the gesture  needed to do this
> (a triangle drawn counter-clockwise from lower left) is a bit hard to

it is? the gesture is just "slide finger up". no triangle :) not sure how you
got the triangle thing :) (place finger at kbd bottom, slide, lift finger)

> get right; hopefully there will be a  button to switch this. As well,

unlikely :)

> the current version of ASU uses QTopia's input manager, offering what
> looks like a predictive style but is  actually doing a dictionary

actually - it doesn't - i wrote one from scratch :) the code is ugly - but it
works. it does use standard linux dict files though for the dictionary - the
one we ship is an abbreviated one with only 5000 words - but they also have
extended frequency counts. have a dig around the illume package files and see -
it's just a text file. :) it also maintains a user dictionary for personal
words you added in ~/.e/e/ :) same format.

> lookup; I find this very distracting compared to a plain do-what-I-type
> keyboard, and would welcome an easy way to turn this off (I thought
> Lorne Potter posted this once, but I couldn't find it).

it will do what you type - but you'd better have a stylus or a very sharp
pointy fingernail :) the dictionary is intended to make it easy to type with
your fingers and it fixes your typos for common "english" entry. the dictionary
files are text so other language can be added (note - it won't be that happy
with it at the moment, something i need to fix as i was busy just making it
work at all).

> 3) It's easy to accidentally start an application (thus slowing down
> what you're trying to really do) while scrolling the home screen in icon
> grid mode.

there is an adjustment for this - its in the interaction dialog, yes its ugly -
i know. i keep fiddling with it every now and again to see if i can't make it
behave a bit more like i "intend". :)

> 4) The Preferences that are in the top slide-down panel's Wrench icon
> should presumably be merged with the Preferences App.

currently those are preferences for enlightenment - and thus it has its own
settings dialog/panel like all applications anywhere on any desktop do :)

> 5) The shutdown dialog does not have a cancel or Back button.
> And, it often doesn't actually shutdown.

that may actually go - that's just qtopia's default dialog - the # of app icons
will likely reduce by a lot as we trim out things we don't really need.

> All for now. Again, please remember that this is very early access.
> And don't let my nit-picking distract you from the fact that it's
> looking good for something that was merged only a few weeks ago!
> 
> Ian Darwin
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>