After looking at the wiki's whiteboard page for the onscreen keyboard, I noticed some options and features to improve
what was already suggested.
1) The wiki mentions Chinese/Japanese
handwriting recognition, and mentions Cell-Writer as an already existing technology. But there are several other open source projects trying to bring handwritten Chinese to Linux currently:
a)
Tomoe http://tomoe.sourceforge.jp/cgi-bin/en/blog/index.rb b) Tegaki http://www.tegaki.org/c) Zinnia http://zinnia.sourceforge.net/ 2) Maybe you could integrate a number-row directly into the normal alphabet keyboard, like HP's Touchpad does their keyboard:
http://www.popherald.com/Post-photos/april-11/hp%2Btouchpad%2Bvirtual%2Bkeyboard.jpgThat would make entering passwords and whatnot much easier. It would be great if Gnome-shell can make the keyboard smart, like the iPad, so that it can auto-detect what type of keyboard options to bring up based on what type of text field was clicked.
3) Finally, the current location of the messaging area will conflict with an onscreen keyboard, unless the messaging area rides up the screen with the keyboard as is slides onscreen. I saw elsewhere where someone mentioned its current location was a problem for touchscreens, because there was no way to activate it absent a mouse. Would a redesign of that feature be off the table? It does not make total sense that the user's online status is controlled in the upper right hand corner,
but messaging is in the lower right hand corner. Why not integrate them both in the upper right?
Let me end this email by saying what a wonderful job everyone did developing Gnome 3! It is absolutely gorgeous, and is definitely me new preferred desktop!
Regards,
Brian Fleeger
