Re: 3.6 Feature: IBus/XKB integration

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Federico Mena Quintero
<federico gnome org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-04-25 at 15:31 +0100, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
>
>> no way to find the audience that would be unbiased? Are you just
>> implying that the current userbase of GNOME is so geekish that fair
>> survey among existing users would only represent the POV of geeks?
>
> It would be very instructive to see how non-geek people configure their
> keyboards (if they do at all!), and how they manage to survive on an
> everyday basis.
...

It isn't so much how people configure their keyboards as how they (a)
switch between different languages/alphabets and (b) insert special
characters. For (a) the CJK languages are particularly complex, and
I've done a lot of talking with i18n folk (who seem to have a pretty
good handle on this) for that reason. (b) is varied because there are
so many ways to do the same thing, from alt codes on Windows (seem to
be popular, for some reason) and option codes on Mac, to the use of
character maps and the web (how else can I find that snowman unicode
character [1]?).

To me, this feature is the first step in a wider effort to make it
easier to use different languages on GNOME and to make it easy to
insert special characters. Once we've established some good defaults
and sanitised our configuration options, we can start to look at other
ways we can improve the experience for our users [2].

Allan ☃

[1] http://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/
[2] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/ExtraCharacters
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