Coming to the End...

Over the past week I have submitted a ton of little patches here and there that are really making the keyboard come to life. I have really been all over the place, from removing warning messages in the GNOME shell output due to the keyboard to redesigning the hide/show feature and message tray. I am amazed to see how much the keyboard has grown over the summer and also to see how much code has been generated (not all of it going into the final design, of course).
Here's another example of the keyboard at use (here I'm chatting with my mom):

Until next time,
Nohemi

A video capture

I have made a video! Sorry for the stumble at the end, I didn't want it to be highlighted. Well, here it is:

And here is positioning:

For a preview video thanks to Ray (halfline) look at:

In order to do a video capture with GNOME shell just press CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + R. A little red button will appear on the bottom of your screen while you're recording. Press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+R again to stop the recording. A file named shell-[date]-[#] will appear in your home directory in webm format.

If you'd like to upload your own video or link to youtube please feel free to do so and paste the link here for others to see :)

Test it Out!

For those people that have asked how to test out the keyboard, I have good news for you: the keyboard has been pushed to the GNOME shell master branch! You just have to pull the latest updates and then a11y menu -> Screen Keyboard -> ON. If you want to check out my latest updates, it is available at https://github.com/nohemi/GNOME-OnScreen-Keyboard.

Some known issues (from my branch on github) include:

• Layout positioning (I may add more buttons later)
• Message tray icon in keyboard not grayed in overview (the design is that it shouldn't be enabled in the overview).
• Message tray hiding is choppy.  
• Floating mode is currently broken, should default to stuck-to-bottom keyboard.

To enable Caribou positioning: Do Alt+F2 then in box type "env GTK_IM_MODULE=caribou"

Some of the more recent things I've fixed are the alignment of the keys within the keyboard layout (yes, they are now aligned!), hiding the message tray behind the keyboard, and redesigning the stuck-to-bottom keyboard.

Once I get home I'll see if I can do a video capture to better illustrate the functionality of the keyboard at the moment :) Also, I'd appreciate feedback (ie. bugs in the key/keyboard functions), but please keep in mind that I am not responsible for generating design ideas for the keyboard. This means that if you have design ideas talk to the GNOME shell designers (I can't guarantee they'll trickle down to me though).

I'll be on my flight soon, so see you later!

On a week of travel

Hello,
This is a late update on the keyboard progress. I've been traveling because of fourth of July weekend, but having settled down a bit today I'll report. Last week I fixed the positioning code, so depending where you type on the screen the keyboard will place itself correctly. Unfortunately, it's so good at hiding right now that the minute the focus is removed from the input device to take a screen shot it goes away :(. So, you'll just have to trust me for now that it moves above the input device if on the bottom half of the screen and vice versa for the top.

Since, Dan had to present the keyboard I also spend a good time cleaning up the general look/functionality of the keys. If you press Ctrl/Alt key by accident now, you can just click again to "release" the key. I also fixed the message tray button, so that it properly shows/hides the message tray when clicked (this deactivates the "hot corner"). Other than that I had some Caribou patches rebased and sent, so that everyone can have this functionality. Although today I did some rebasing with Caribou master, since it had been a while since my last update. Updates can be a little overwhelming at times, but thanks to abstractions (yay!) I only need to change a couple more things to get the keyboard back to where it was.
  

For those of you that pointed out the flaws in the fullscale layout, here is what I have updated to. Still need some work with it, since Caribou made an alignment change, but the buttons are mostly all in the right places now :)

Enjoy the rest of your holiday week!
Nohemi