> Thanks for the reply but I think you missed the mark on some things.

I find that difficult to believe given my first name. ;-)

That being said, I can definitely be wrong...

> What makes a soft key a soft key and not any other key is the fact
> that a portion of the display shows what the key will do when it is
> pressed. Which is why when different developers put the delete on the
> right or the left it's not a big deal because you don't have to
> remmeber which does which. So it IS a big step forward.

It's a label at the bottom of the screen, and a convention for what
buttons (if any) should be considered "soft keys" for different device
configurations.

That's definitely useful for developers who choose to use it. Personally,
I'd drop "big" from "a big step forward", but I'm just a crusty old
curmudgeon.

> In my original post I said that the soft keys should only be mapped
> stupidly in the case that the programmer neglects to provide the soft
> key construction or hints him/herself. So I was not advocating doing
> it only that way in the first place.

You seem to be arguing that *every activity always* has soft keys, no
matter what the developer wants. Otherwise, there is no such thing as "the
programmer neglects to provide the soft key construction or hints", as
that could well be intentional.

I can see having soft keys in some settings but not others (e.g., video
playback, camera "viewfinder" mode). That's why I'm not a huge fan of
mandatory automagically-configured soft keys. That being said, if the
Android team chooses to go that route, that's their call.

I'd rather we as a community figure out how to offer some measure of soft
key capability without changes to the SDK; if the Android team wishes to
bake something into some future SDK release, so much the better.

-- 
Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy)
http://commonsware.com
_The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development_ -- Available Now!



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