* David Marceau <[email protected]> wrote: > Thank you Selene for sharing my pain with the ubunt-touch > on-screen keyboard. It's really hard to use emacs with the > current OSK.
Emacs is hard to use with just one or two fingers, period. Touch screens and key chording don't get along very well. The UI concepts I had in mind were more along the lines of swiping between letters instead of tapping, holding a key to shift to a different set of characters, sliding off a key to indicate modifiers or alternate glyphs, adaptive bayesian text prediction to fix typos and guess what's coming next, integrated text-editing functions, and making the layouts highly customizable by end users. > I'm also wishing the precious screen real-estate would be preserved. > How hard is it to produce a full keyboard/mouse for a > cellphone. ... I would have preferred a fully-integrated > keyboard into the phone with no bluetooth ... Hardware companies tried in the past. For example, the HP 200LX, the Sharp Zaurus SL-C860, the Sony Clie PEG-UX50, even the Nokia N810. None of these were hugely successful, and physical keyboards of that size were mediocre at best. My thumbs hurt even thinking about trying to type on my n810. The market has mostly decided that a flat slab of touch-sensitive smart glass is the way forward. Canonical doesn't make hardware though; it merely tries to make a better user experience on existing hardware. A completely flat surface is a bit hard to type on, even when it's the size of a real keyboard and can handle all ten fingers. Look at the Touchstream LP keyboard for an example. Great and innovative hardware, awesome gesture handling, but ultimately not as nice for text entry as a traditional keyboard. > Why can't there be some standard keyboard manufacturer for all > phones with a standard connector for all future phones? > Shouldn't clamshell keyboards/mice on phones be a standard? Standard connectors, yes. MicroUSB and Bluetooth pretty much won that war. Except for Apple, which refused to use MicroUSB even when the EU made it a requirement. Otherwise, getting people to agree well enough to make anything on a phone standard is pretty much impossible... especially with the huge variety of very different things people use their devices for. Your earlier example of emacs on a phone demonstrates that point -- the amazing diversity of the population. There won't be one solution which works for everyone. The best we can hope for is to do one thing and do it well, and make sure it addresses many of the most common needs. -- Selene -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
