Tauno and everyone else, thank you for your responses here. Tauno, I have to agree with you that while long-press menu is not intuitively obvious, it appears to be a standard means of bringing up the soft keyboard (when it works) and said standard should be maintained.
After all, it would seem to me that this type of operation is provided at the OS level and the applications should not be required to provide their own buttons, etc. to force the thing up when it has been closed by the user or otherwise not automatically provided. And while long- press menu may be an "ugly" way to implement this feature, it has the benefit of precedence - it was the means provided for first in Android. So, I think we can conclude that the Hero implementation of Android is broken, deliberately or otherwise isn't important. The question then is, what is a user to do on a phone that is running an Android app and has no means to bring up the soft keyboard? So far, they've chosen to complain about the app on the market. Which is unfortunate, because the Android 1.1 app can't force the keyboard if it wanted to. Now that the OS fails to provide for this functionality consistently, it falls on the app to provide it - in my case, leaving any users of the older OS without an update path until their service providers provide updates. Maybe that isn't an issue, but I have no way of knowing. I'm also not convinced that relying on an OS feature (which hasn't been deprecated as far as I can tell) constitutes a bad UI design. Tauno also makes an excellent point about consistency where multiple apps now have to implement workarounds via buttons (which eat up a lot of screen real estate), menus (which may be full of other app specific options, now forcing them to a "more" list), and graphic consistency. Its ashamed. I would have hoped that the Android OS, when implemented on a new device might have a set of minimum standards that they comply with - even if it is on a voluntary basis that might earn them a "certification" or something - just spit-balling here. I really like the fact that Android has the ability to have different input methods, that developers can build their own for general use or specifically for use with their app. This flexibility is great and will certainly help the OS to adapt to a number of new platforms. However, with great power comes great responsibility. The OS needs to make this flexibility transparent to the app. The app shouldn't care if the input comes from a physical keyboard, a soft keyboard, a bluetooth keyboard, or some futuristic neural implant. It should just recognize that some key has been pressed and deal with it. Likewise, this flexibility requires that the OS provide the means to determine the input method by default (of course the app can override). Any hope the Hero will be fixed - assuming the Hero implementation is even considered broken by the vendor? What other surprises are we in store for with the other new phones that will be released? Has anyone seen anything resembling a consistent way for an application to handle this in the wild? Again, thank you for the continued discussion. Also, I hope this doesn't sound like a rant, but rather a brain-dump - for what its worth. Best Regards, Eric --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
