[GOK] First alpha version of Caribou

[Mats Lundälv <mats lundalv vgregion se>]

Hi Ben,

Congratulations to the first version of Caribou!
I successfully installed and ran it on my Ubuntu 9.10 in VirtualBox (in WinXP).
It seems stable and the direct mouse input - and output to active application seems to work fine.

I made a customised Swedish keyboard layout with an additional row of keys to test non-English characters, and that worked fine too. The only character I've found so far that does not get output to the target app is the Euro sign € - for some reason. So your first goal for Dec 11 already seems to be well on the way.

I'll get back in more detail on the GOK list ...

Cheers,
Mats


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Från: Ben Konrath <ben konrath utoronto ca>
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Datum: 2009-12-02 01:25
Ärende: [GOK] Announce: Caribou 0.0.1

Announcing the first release of Caribou!

What is Caribou
===============

Caribou is a text entry and UI navigation application being developed as
an alternative to the Gnome On-screen Keyboard. Caribou will focus on
creating a usable solution for people whose primary way of accessing a
computer is a switch device. More information about Caribou can be found
here:

http://live.gnome.org/Caribou

Downloading Caribou
===================

http://bagu.org/scratch/caribou-0.0.1.tar.bz2

Contributing to Caribou
=======================

For now the code resides in my personal git repository until I can get
it into the GNOME repository:

http://bagu.org/projects/?a=summary&p=caribou

You can clone this repository by running the following command:

git clone http://bagu.org/projects/caribou.git

Feel free to contact me with any questions, comments or suggestions.
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Hi all,

I wasn't subscribed to the list when I replied to this message so I've
include my original reply below.

Cheers, Ben

++

Hi Mats,

Thanks for your input; it's always nice to hear from passionate people
like yourself :-). I've included a few comments below.

On 09/17/2009 11:36 AM, Mats Lundälv wrote:

> Why not a set of simplified/basic layouts in GOK covering the OnBoard
> ambitions instead?

Good point. Please file a bug about this against GOK in GNOME's bugzilla.

> Ideally, we should have all good forces focusing on the development and
> maintenance of one solid OSK solution for Gnome (and possibly other
> platforms) - covering well the wide range of needs - from basic standard
> QWERTY layouts - to advanced dynamic layouts, and including support for
> graphics to include AAC users. The basic functionality for all these needs
> is a set of rock solid input - navigation and selection - alternatives to
> cover different user demands. The OSK content and layout should be handled
> by a common layout manager.

A reasonable goal but I think we need to take things one step at a time
and come up with a realistic plan for GNOME 3.0.

> In the AEGIS discussions we have touched upon the alternative of moving
> GOK over to Java in order to give it a much broader user and maintenance
> base. The question is whether a Java implementation  - a JOK - could be as
> effective and well integrated in the Gnome environment as GOK is and has
> the potential of being? What do you guys think?

As Steve mentioned, I think Python is better suited for this task but we
should discuss all the options before we proceed. I encourage anybody
interested to join the GOK mailing list to continue this discussions.

> One thing that would greatly support participation in the short
> perspective were if new releases could be packaged directly for say the
> Ubuntu and OpenSolaris platforms. I myself find it hard to participate and
> give feedback as I would like to when I regularly get the message about
> where I can download the source code of the latest update. To get any
> wider participation for this user group you just cannot go on expecting
> stakeholders to download and compile sources. You should just be able to
> download and install the new binary directly - in parallell to the current
> official release installation - and run, test and give feedback!

The GNOME project doesn't generally release binaries - that's up to the
consumers of GNOME (the Linux distributions). For me, working through
the details of making supplemental packages for various distributions
would be a major distraction. But there's nothing stopping other people
from doing this. Perhaps this should be perused at the distro level.

Thanks again for your comments. I'm looking forward to further
discussion on GOK's mailing list.

Cheers, Ben