Features/Onscreen Keyboard
Summary
An on-screen keyboard for Sugar, targeted primarily at tablet like devices (which have no physical keyboards).
Owner
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- Name: Sayamindu
- Email: sayamindu@sugarlabs.org
Current status
- Targeted release: N/A
- Last updated: 06/29/2010
- Percentage of completion: 10%
Detailed Description
With OLPC announcing the XO-3 tablet, and with hardware like the JooJoo tablet, Sugar should become better suited for touch-based, physical keyboard-less devices. The on-screen keyboard feature aims to provide one such functionality. On-screen keyboards are also important for certain accessibility related contexts, but use cases like that are better handled by specialized software like Features/Accessibility_virtualkeyboard.
Software
While a number of FOSS on-screen keyboard software exists, the initial experiments are being carried out with fvkbd (Free Virtual KeyBoarD). The advantages of fvkbd include:
- Minimal external dependency outside the Sugar platform (only libfakekey is required as an extra)
- Actively maintained
- Internationalization friendly
- Has a library providing most of functionality which can be used later via Python bindings/introspection to achieve tighter integration with Sugar
Benefit to Sugar
A virtual/on-screen keyboard is probably the first component people think about when it comes to Sugar on a tablet device like the XO-3. It can be seen as a stepping stone for making Sugar more tablet-friendly and is essential for easily debugging and developing Sugar on a tablet machine.
Scope
UI Design
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How To Test
Features/Onscreen Keyboard/Testing
User Experience
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Dependencies
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Contingency Plan
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Documentation
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Release Notes
The Sugar Release Notes inform end-users about what is new in the release. An Example is 0.84/Notes. The release notes also help users know how to deal with platform changes such as ABIs/APIs, configuration or data file formats, or upgrade concerns. If there are any such changes involved in this feature, indicate them here. You can also link to upstream documentation if it satisfies this need. This information forms the basis of the release notes edited by the release team and shipped with the release.