Hi Francesco, Sorry for the delay in responding to this. It kinda fell off my radar with all the holiday madness going on :-).
First of all, I want to thank you for bringing this up. It's import to discuss things like this to make sure that we all know the various motivations behind what we're all working on. So basically I don't think that Onboard should go away - if it works for people, than I think they should use it. In my opinion, Caribou is different enough in a number of areas that it justifies its development. When I started thinking about replacing GOK, I decided that I wanted to re-think what an onscreen keyboard should be. I decided that the new app should be focused on inputting text efficiently rather than trying to represent a physical keyboard in software. I actually go out of my way to make sure that I don't use the term 'on-screen keyboard' with Caribou because it tends to limit what people think it should be. One of the ways Caribou is different from Onboard is that uses simplified layouts similar to what are found in modern smart phones. The idea with this is these simplified layouts seem to be working well for most of the the smart phone users so they should work well for text input in Desktop systems too. Of course we won't be able to cover all cases with these simplified layouts but people can always create their own layouts if the included layouts don't cover all of characters / use cases they need. Caribou also uses an inline window rather than a window controlled by the window manager. This allows the user's attention to be closer to the text they are entering. Eventually I would like to see Caribou host other text input widgets in its inline window. So maybe we'll see a Dasher widget in the Caribou Window or we might even be able to even put Onboard inside the Caribou Window if someone feels that's a good solution for them. The only reason I started with the keyboard widget is because GOK was my starting point. Another part of the plan for Caribou is to add switch support to the keyboard widget and inline scanning of application UIs. Of coarse these are big tasks but my plan is to make the switch support as a module that other programs can use. Onboard could use this as well if people want it. To repsond to a couple of your specific points, Caribou actually uses virtkey as well so we're not duplicating effort there. We're also following the work on the dbus prediction engine and plan to use it when it's ready. I hope this clears things up a bit. Please respond if you have any more concerns. I'm happy to discuss things further. Cheers, Ben _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
