Onscreen Keyboard- Weekly Report 03
This week I dedicated my time to fixing the layout and getting the extended keys to work properly. After speaking to the Eitan, the main developer of Caribou, I realized that our out-of-date version of Caribou was the reason that the keys were not working properly (some problems with X). So, I am waiting for the final push of https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=651558 in order to start merging the code from lists to arrays.
Although I had a lot planned for this week, I surprised myself by finishing everything I had planned and even starting to think ahead to next week. At first I had issues with moving around the keyboard layout and extended keys layout, though I eventually figured out the ST properties needed to make the changes I needed (kudos to Marina and Dan). In addition to this I was also able to get the former "preferences" icon hide the keyboard when clicked. This puts the keyboard into the message tray. Then if you right click it and press "open" the keyboard appears anew. There were some design issues with the “remove” button (deciding whether or not we want it to actually do anything, since gsettings controls whether the keyboard is shown or not), but we will be considering these issues in the future depending on where we go from here. In terms of displaying the keyboard, I spent some time making sure the hide() and show() worked properly and fixing some code stylistics. I also set the keyboard up for manual setup with gsettings. That involved changing org.gnome.shell.gschema.xml.in and then running with “jhbuild run gsettings list-keys org.gnome.shell.keyboard”. By the end of the week I played with the CSS settings to get the keyboard looking more like https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/ScreenKeyboard and developed a formula so that the keyboard would fit any screen without the keys cutting off.
Next week I'm looking at developing another keyboard mode: the “floating” mode. This mode will be used for people with smaller screens that can't afford the space-consuming alternative. I believe I will make it work like Caribou by having the keyboard follow wherever the user is typing. It may also be manually dragged. If the GJS array patch gets pushed I will work on merging my vala list code with the array code. Other than that, I will work on anything else necessary for the week.
Some helpful advice I've already posted on my blog for Fedora 15 users using GNOME shell for graphics crashes is the following:
<marina> switch to the text mode
with Ctrl+Alt+F2
<marina> type "DISPLAY=:0 gnome-shell"
<marina> and switch back to the graphic mode with Ctrl+Alt+F1
Thanks again Marina!
Cheers,
Nohemi Fernandez