Regional Keyboards

[Phawx]

You know what would be a fantastic idea. If the keys used e-ink instead of OLED. e-ink only needs to be charged to change state and that's it. For power reasons e-ink would be the bee's knees.

I believe it's too late for such things, and even on-time this would be out of scope. A better, easier to develop solution would be having a special button for displaying a translucent overlay on-screen with an alterate keyboard layout, as I described in post #19.


I believe its too late as well, not to mention way to expensive. I was more about wishing for 'Pandora 2' things

 

[Edy]

But seriously having the option for different matts for different languages is the most common sense approach to this and should be acceptable to the rest of the community

I really doubt it. Some Pandoras would be useable in specific regions only, and application developers would have to deal with the hell of having different keyboard layouts when mapping keys and writting documentation. Using an standard, international keymat would assure that the key "Z" has a "Z" in every Pandora out there.

Take a look at my proposed solution at post #19.

 

[Bronek]

The problem is that there's no such thing as a generic keypad layout that's going to please everyone. Americans (and presumably people in the UK) are going to want easy access to buttons and symbols they use on a daily basis without having to press three buttons. If I have to do more than hit shift to get a comma or parenthesis it's going to end up being inconvient either for text messaging over wifi or simply typing a document.

the same applies to users of all languages based on latin alphabet. Which is why comma or parenthesis or other popular symbols should be accessible through at most one extra key press in any language.

Then there are the people from the non english speaking regions are going to be demanding all kinds of symbols that english either rarely uses ot never uses at all.

which supports craigx idea that regional keymats should be made available and does not rule out standard English-only keyboard.

 

[mali]

I really doubt it. Some Pandoras would be useable in specific regions only, and application developers would have to deal with the hell of having different keyboard layouts when mapping keys and writting documentation. Using an standard, international keymat would assure that the key "Z" has a "Z" in every Pandora out there.

"Z" should be relative. Not bound to a certain physical key, just the keycode produced by the driver and the driver is programmable.

 

[Klaus]

Secondly, there are often minor inconveniences with localized products. For example a localized version of Windows has "Programme" as its default directory for applications. The directory in the more widely used versions of Windows is called "program files" however. So this is no problem as long as all your applications are properly localized. But an application that is not properly localized will try to install itself in "program files", it will not find such a directory and create one. So, sooner or later, you will end up with two standard directories for applications and you never know in which one the application your looking for is hiding :rolleyes: ED assured me that there will be no such stupid problems with localized keypads because all applications will use the correct driver. But I am not so sure....

This even got better with Vista. Now both folders, "Programme" and "Program Files", show up as "Programme" and you end up with two "Programme"-Folders in Explorer! You actually have to go to the command-prompt to find out which one of those is "Program Files". I'll bet this will be fixed in Windows 7, where both will show up under the same name at the command-prompt.

On topic, keymapping shouldn't be a problem. If a program listens for key X, it will get key X when it's pressed. If not, the programmer did something stupid.

 

[pubzombie]

Being a native english speaker I'm fine with a standard keyboard, as long as its possible to remap or use modifier keys for accessing specific regional characters (swedish and spanish in particular)

ditto

 

[Monk]

If not, the programmer did something stupid.

No offense intended to all the Pandora and Lunix programmers out there who are completely different to the folks Microsoft employ, but... who do you think wrote Windows and countless other programs out there? The problem with computers, for the most part, is that humans make them - and humans do stupid things!

Like banks refunding actual money obtained form credit cards. Like banks lending money to people who cannot afford to repay it ("sub prime mortgages" indeed!). Like cancelling "FireFly" and "Doctor Who" (don't panic, I mean the original series) and so on and so forth. As a race, we're brilliant - but we can be brilliantly stupid too!

A lot of programming "stupidities" have been to do with saving time - being quicker, more efficient. Accessing the hardware directly has been a common progrmaming trait when speed is of the essence, and with games (and emulators) it is almost ALWAYS "of the essence", so an area where programmers are more likely than ever to skip the OS interface in favour of faster, direct access. Especially on a platform which is supposed not to be changing "soon" - so they don't have to worry about different graphics cards, different amounts of memory, different this or that... accessing hardware directly can shave serious overhead off of some routine operations and overcome some limitaitons (sometimes).

 

[mali]

Addressing a keyboard key directly, how stupid is that?

 

[Monk]

Addressing a keyboard key directly, how stupid is that?

Well, a LOT of people who wrote for computers prior to DirectX/Windows95, but a fairly quick Google also throws up:

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Art-Game-Progr...d/dp/1571690042
(Black Art of 3D Game Programming: Writing Your Own High-Speed 3D Polygon Video Games in C (Paperback))

and

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lRUj-nhQRu8C
(Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus)

Although there are probably many other examples, that should be sufficient IMHO. What's "stupid" to one person may be "vitally important" to another. Directly accessing the keyboard SHOULD, IMHO, be much rarer than when I was writing on 1MHZ and 2MHZ CPUs, but that doesn't mean it's definately never used any more.

 

[mali]

Yep. We are all doomed. I've got enough.

 

[Yamara]

As a native English speaker who also dabbles in Norwegian, Portuguese and Spanish, I put my vote in for the standard keyboard to have a Compose key. I myself wouldn't buy an alternate language keyboard, except perhaps if there were an English alternate that *doesn't* have German letters on it. It depends what symbols might have been sacrificed for those letters.

If there are going to be alternate keyboards, to me it makes sense to have an English standard one, and a separate German standard one. (And others, based on demand.) Mixing the two to make one keyboard that annoys both sets of people seems odd, if there are region specific keyboards planned anyway.

 

[hch]

If we did this, would it make you all happy? or is it ?

qwerty
qwertz

 

[lulzfish]

Yeah, I like the Compose key. It seems like it would allow for a lot of alternate keys without tying up space for Fns and stuff.

 

[MDave]

I think there is really one one or two very vocal people on both sides of the camp, that makes it sound worse then it is. Everyone else doesn't seem to mind what they get, although they do prefer they get they're region's layout. Then again, anyone would, wouldn't they?

 

[hkipp]

If we did this, would it make you all happy? or is it ?

The last rendering (PandaFront) did show öäüß, so that makes me very happy. It comes as QWERTY to please all/most/some english speakers, which is something I can live with. To use unix, it is however very important to get all the special characters like . , : ; < > | / \ * ? # ~ _ - + ( ) { } [ ] = ´ ` " $ % & !.

For everything else one can use either a graphical keypad, use an additional usb- or bluetooth-keyboard or handwriting recognition. I think a general english keyboard with unix-required characters and some country specific characters (either because the country is a big market or does not have too many special characters) should be enough for now. Remember, this is mainly for starting programs under linux and typing in text in retro games (most only understood A-Z,0-9 anyway), right?

Imho a language/region specific pandora should only be considered after at least 100.000 units were sold ;-)
Cater for people to select their own keymapping if they need it and get over with this discussion.

Anyone needs arabic, hebrew, greek, cyrillic, japanese or chinese keyboard right now?

Well, that's my 2 cents worth anyway (damn it, where is the cent sign on this german keyboard and why is there a square and cubic-sign and a mu, which I barely use?)

Best regards,
Holger
:lol:

 

[MWeston]

FWIW this was my last suggestion for the keypad layout:

 

[hch]

I think there is really one one or two very vocal people on both sides of the camp, that makes it sound worse then it is. Everyone else doesn't seem to mind what they get, although they do prefer they get they're region's layout. Then again, anyone would, wouldn't they?

i don't. and if you read through the thread you'll see that this is not a loneley opinion.

seriously, for a device with a userbase of 4000 to start off with 10 localized variants - how useful is that?

 

[urjaman]

FWIW this was my last suggestion for the keypad layout:

You have 2 inserts? (Fn-J and Fn-backspace)

 

[salasq]

FWIW this was my last suggestion for the keypad layout:

Sony U101 was my primary machine for 2 years. I still use it when travelling rough or suchlike, no netbook I've seen ever came close in usability. One thumb for mouse and other for buttons works really, really well on a device of this size.

Ctrl and Alt this close on such small keys might prove problematic for non-pianists here, but can be swapped with shoulder ones in software. Like F11/12 on correct side of keyboard. Twin inserts?

I see why you didn't bother duplicating the shift functions of number keys as in some of the newer proposals in other threads - the less commonly used punctuation went to top row, right?

Everyone else doesn't seem to mind what they get, although they do prefer they get they're region's layout. Then again, anyone would, wouldn't they?

Not me.

 

[MWeston]

You have 2 inserts? (Fn-J and Fn-backspace)

Ah yes, sorry. Scratch the one on the J key.