Re: [Usability] [Fwd: RE: Your final comments on gswitchit in 2.4...]

[Ernst De Ridder <hnridder informatik uni-rostock de>]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2003 at 03:30:39PM +0100, Sergey V. Oudaltsov wrote:
> > That's just to say that it's always possible to do it
> > in realtime.  If the xdbprint (or whatever it's
> > called) path it's too slow, then you would have to
> > redo your own generator or drop it.
> Well, Ivan Pascal offered me to create my own keyboard render (he even 
> contributed some initial code). I just thought that one of the "Unix 
> way" things is reusing existing components. And I thought 

It's not just the "unix way" it's the One True Path:-)

> xkbprint+bonobo+ggv is a good way to do it. Probably I was wrong. 

Isn't it good enough to just generate a temporary postscript file and run
ghostview on it?

> > Anyway I think that it will suck too much visual space
> > for no significative gain, so if it was my decision, I
> > would just drop it.
> OK. I will take your opinion into account. I just would love to get more 
> voices. So far, I just got one your voice: "No preview necessary at 
> all". People, anyone else?

Yes! Don't drop it!
A preview might not be necessary if you have keyboard that's marked with
different layouts, but otherwise it's almost essential. When I started to
learn Russian I activated a Russian keyboard layout, but, naturally, my
US-keyboard doesn't show any cyrillic characters. Without xkbprint I would
have had to draw a keyboard myself, and press every single key in
combination with all possible modifiers to find out what it is. For a
quality keyboard switching tool, a way to display the layout is simply
essential. I don't think it's necessary to show it inside the properties
window though (it is nice, of course). Simply opening a new ghostview window
would be good enough.

> > Ask yourself why these people are using different
> > shortcuts.
> Because they USED TO.

Or because they don't like particular ones. Personally, I switch using
scroll lock - that's key seems to have no use at all otherwise:)

> Some non-trivial usage of indicators, modifier keys, Compose key etc. 
> Really "Advanced" stuff.

About the "advanced" tab suggestion someone made: The disadvantage of such a
scheme is that it is not at all clear to the user what is in it. When does
some feature qualify as "advanced"?

Ernst