On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 8:09 PM, Mathieu Bridon <[email protected]> wrote:
> Could it be because none of them are of sufficient quality that they feel > the need to constantly try new ones, in the hopes that it will be better > than the rest? Yes, but the closed-source Windows engines basically outperform current IBus engines currently. You should check a fancy one to get some inspiration (just screenshots). http://pinyin.engkoo.com/help?b=1 Sogou's smart edition is fancy in another aspect but it is hard to explain without certain Chinese language knowledge. Anyway, I'm not arguing that Windows rocks. I'd argue that we are not in a position that we try to provide all the input experience to user directly. Because we are not able to do so. You probably able to develop ibus-cangjie even without extensive Chinese knowledge because it's simple in itself. But for Pinyin, Wubi and probably some others are much harder. Instead, we should try to do things. 1. Keep the IBus platform open to third-party engines. We probably never have a perfect engine for Pinyin, but that's OK. As long as different people can served by different engines. 2. Keep a list of supported engines and let distributions ship them. I really feel that Mac OS X's default input method list is much cleaner than Windows's. But it is worse in most currently Linux distributions because input method installation is generally dependent on language. If a English-speaking user want to get some inspiration on Japanese by try inputting Japanese, she'd figure out ibus-anthy or ibus-mozc is the package to install, too hard. Note that a filter of supported engines doesn't help. For example, on a system without Chinese engines installed. A user try to install some Chinese engines. She will be confused by the fact that some appear after installation and some don't. > Also, when you say "users", who are you talking about? Linux users, who are > generally more eager to tinker and try stuff? Or the more general population > who only use computers as a tool to get something done? Don't be bad to Linux geeks. Even though many of them try hard to use other IMFs and they are beyond our scope. Many Mainland Chinese Linux users are OK with IBus 1.4 by using ibus-pinyin, ibus-sunpinyin or ibus-rime. But if we break the property menu, then I don't think they can tolerate that. I cannot, either! I don't have much experience with computers in work space, Mainland. But for personal Windows I met, none of them are using Windows built-in engines. This means that general computer users do understand the concept of engines. ( I don't think they understand the concept of frameworks, though. ) _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
