May 27th, 2010 byQuite often, designers work on a design for something they’re unlikely to use themselves. This is a situation I’ve found myself in the past few weeks, designing a new keyboard menu for Ubuntu.
This menu will replace both the keyboard layout toggle from Ubuntu’s doomed notification area, and the IBus menu for choosing a keyboard input method. I use just one keyboard layout myself, but switching layouts is important for millions of multilingual users. And input methods are important for typing characters in languages that have hundreds or thousands of characters, such as Chinese and Korean.
Keyboard layouts and input methods are highly related things, so showing them in the same menu is long overdue. It would be great if we could also merge the Keyboard Preferences window with the IBus Preferences window; Canonical engineers don’t have time for that in the near future, but I’d be happy to work on a design with anyone who is interested.
At UDS earlier this month we discussed the new menu. We’d also like your feedback on the full specification, especially if you use input methods or multiple keyboard layouts.
The toolkit
9 Responseshide comments
What would merging the two dialogs mean? Basically merging the tabs and removing duplicate elements as a first step? I’d be interested in that, if the task’s not too complex.
evfool, exactly. Probably the “Layouts” tab in Keyboard Preferences and the “Input Methods” tab in IBus Preferences should be merged, with a single modifiable list that mirrors the contents of the menu. After that, the main challenge would be rearranging the other elements from the two windows so they make sense (it would be no good having two separate “General” tabs, for example).
Here’s an extremely rough, preliminary sketch I did to get an idea of how complex the merged tab would be: http://imgur.com/BHXp9
I want MPT’s handwriting as my desktop font. Thanks.
The most aggravating aspect of the current notification area icon is that I can’t disable it (prior to 10.04, it wasn’t there at all). All I want to do is be able to switch back and forth between two layouts with a keyboard shortcut, without an icon (notification area or application indicator) cluttering up my screen. I think that this is a fairly common situation, too. Will this be possible with the new keyboard menu? Even a gconf option would be much appreciated.
Ah, I see this is a use case in the spec, labeled “5. User switches the keyboard menu on or off”. Thank you so much!
+1 for having the choice to disable/enable the keyboard menu
May I suggest having the two most used input langues on top. Even in 7 this is slightly annoying as typically there is multiple types of one language all rolled into a package, but I only use one subset (ex hiragana, kanji is auto added). Maybe put, ex. davorak & Macintosh in a submenu etc..? Clicking USA will use the last used one…
Rather late to the ball:
I like the idea to add the character map. Maybe it should be renamed to something more user-friendly like “Insert character”?
However, I really appreciated the “Show current layout” option in the latest Ubuntu releases. Typical use-cases:
a. a US person (with a US physical keyboard) uses French regularly at work, and has the French layout added. They remember the commonest quirks of the French layout, but do not know the combination for œ, and they have to write a paper on Œdipus Rex.
b. a US person (again with a US physical keyboard) is learning German. They add the layout, but they need to frequently look it up to remember the new combinations.
c. a Greek person buys a notebook abroad or on the Internet and gets a US physical keyboard, with no indications for the Greek alphabet.
Admittedly, all these might not be very frequent cases, but an easy access to one’s layout is important for user-education. And I do think that in many smaller/less developed countries it is not always easy to get a physical keyboard in that country’s language.
Assume you have a Dutch keyboard within your laptop and use also an external US one. You can only select the language desktop-wide but not specify it on a keyboard level. Bonus points for the laptop remembering the keyboard layout of an earlier plugged keyboard.
I agree with jennies comments. Especially if you want to learn new friendly keyboard layouts like dvorak or de-neo2 you want to be able to quickly see the layout of the keyboard. Currently I need to use a printout.
You could also fix the page Layout on the keyboard preferences to actually show the layout, e.g. like ktouch does.