Dear community and OM Powers That Be, I have read the "Openmoko on Design" thread with a certain alienation. I'll try to resist the temptation to pick up one of the many flame baits, but even after sleeping it over for a night, I feel inclined to comment on the issue here.
First, I think that the complaints of users about "the phone should know when it expects keyboard input, and automatically bring up the keyboard" are right. The work going into this direction is correct. However, there are situations when a manual override is needed. The automatic detection could be wrong, for instance. But much more important: the user could be in a situation where keyboard input is theoretically possible, but not currently desired, because the keyboard is taking away screen real estate. This happened to me yesterday, when I was sitting in the train, and reading some code using the terminal application. So, in my opinion, the decision to remove the button is incorrect. Even more so, the strong reaction of the users should have been an indication that the decision was incorrect. It's always a good idea to listen to your users. It has been said that, since OpenMoko is an open project, the community has the chance to come up with a different solution. Now let's take a look at what the community (read: folks who actually write code instead of participating in lengthy discussions) did, the day the button was removed from illume: http://gitweb.openembedded.net/?p=org.openembedded.dev.git;a=blob;f=packages/openmoko-projects/illume/configure-keyboard.patch;h=589fe53f38afc59be95a13ed67a9f9d1fc452148;hb=HEAD They re-enabled the feature in their branch, and went on with their life. However, the patch stopped applying this morning, and I had to lock down illume to r170. Raster: if you could make the keyboard button a configuration option, as in the above patch, you'd make me and a couple of other people happy. Thanks in advance. Andreas _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
