Thread: Firmware PR 1.1 removes features in onscreen keyboard - why?
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benny1967 is offline benny1967
2010-01-04 , 19:11
Posts: 3,790 | Thanked: 5,718 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ Vienna, Austria
#1
Disclaimer:
I'm not one of the people who are currently testing the new Maemo release, so I'm free to speculate here.

Now, have a look at this:

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7391

It seems the next update will remove features that we're used to. (Again, that is.)
The feature described in this bug report is the ability to perform gestures on the virtual keyboard. The most useful gesture is (was) "swipe up" for capital letters: You tap on a letter and swipe up instead of simply taking your finger away again. This equals Shift+letter.

The bug report documents that this feature has intentionally been dropped. For no apparent reason. The reason given doesn't sound valid:

The gestures have been dropped so the FKB allows the users' fingers to be dragged through the keys.
This new behavior is much more useful to input chars using the FKB since it will allow fast typing (user presses two places at a time) as well as correction.
Doesn't sound true to me. It's of course not faster to tap "Shift" first and then a character as compared to the current gesture. Two taps vs. one. Easy.

Also, in the current implementation I just cannot "drag the fingers through the keys". Well, I can move them from W over E to R, but I won't expect this to type the German word "wer" for me. Also, "the user pressing two places at a time" doesn't seem a reasonable option on the N900's resistive screen.
So no advantage here. Right?

I'm not sure.

Sometimes, when you look at the current state of Maemo, you really wonder if dark Finnish winter nights are a good environment for OS design.... But then, crippling something as central as the keyboard for no reason at all - why would they?

Could it be they're actually preparing it for advanced input methods that are around the corner?
Could it be that - not on the N900, but on a future device - "pressing two places at a time" will be something the keyboard has to handle because the screen is no longer resistive?
Could it be that "swiping" from letter to letter (as opposed to tapping on each of them) will be an option in a future release? So they have to get rid of all the other old gestures in time?

What do you think?
Is this the first step to a better onscreen keyboard?
Or is it just one of these Nokia decisions that simply cannot be explained by reason?
 

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