Onscreen Keyboard- Weekly Report 05
So, after resolving the autohell that came about last week, I had a new project on my hands that would be part of finishing the “floating” keyboard. New tablets at RedHat inspired Dan to ask for a full-scale layout mode. This keyboard included the F1-12 buttons, an Esc key, and the dynamic duo, Ctrl and Alt. Generating the keyboard with these additional keys just required some tinkering with the json file that was already available. The hard part came when trying to tackle dynamic duo. Although, traditionally the Ctrl/Alt keys are treated as toggle buttons I wanted to do something a bit different because there was really no point in having the user go through the extra step of turning the buttons on/off. Thus, began the week's journey looking through libgnomekbd, Eekboard, and Caribou for hints on implementation. Eventually, I just decided to extend Caribou by adding latch signals for these keys and developing a new subdirectory of layouts for the full-scale keyboard.
This week was a bit unexpected in what I ultimately finished. I had originally only thought of putting the final touches on the “floating” keyboard, but then took on a much larger project than that. Most of my issues were due to the fact I had not touched the signal passing section of Caribou before, so I didn't completely understand how that worked. Many thanks to Eitan who was always willing to give me a helping hand throughout the process.
Next week Dan will be presenting the keyboard at a RedHat desktop team meeting. This means that I'll be working on the positioning code with Eitan, so that there will be something very awesome in store for the meeting. If time permits I'll also play around with the CSS again and fix the full-scale keyboard layout which is a little cramped at the moment.
My code for the week can be found at https://github.com/danwinship/caribou and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=653136. For more discussion on the positioning code refer to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652862.
Cheers,
Nohemi Fernandez