[haiku-development] Re: Keymaps

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 12:06 PM, pulkomandy <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> On Tue, May 08, 2012 at 07:35:45PM -0400, John Scipione wrote:
> > Fourthly we need to integrate multiple keymap support into ROBP and
> > show it at startup so that you can select your keymaps at first run.
> > We may want to disable ROBP at startup for development builds though
> > and only show it for release builds. We probably also want to add
> > Timezone and other one-time settings there too.
>
> The rest of the todo list is ok, so not commenting.
> About the boot prompt :
> The idea is to get Haiku in a state where you can use installer. This
> means:
>  * A language you can understand,
>  * A keymap that matches your keyboard as closely as possible
>

As was discussed in 'AltGr Key, key_map, and the US-International Keyboard'
Cyrillic users need both a Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, etc.) keymap and a
Latin keymap by default because otherwise they won't be able to do certain
things like use Terminal. Perhaps adding some sort of Latin keymap by
default in addition to the one you select (US-International for instance)
could solve the problem cleanly without requiring the user to choose
multiple keymaps in ROBP. Although, if you select US or most any other
keymap I would not want to install any additional keymaps and would not
want to activate the keymap switcher app. I am trying to make this work for
2 use cases, those that need more than one keymap while simultaneously
catering to those who want only one and don't want to deal with keymap
switching at all.


> A great effort was made so the app can be used in this way. It displays
> only languages for which there are catalogs, and shows a flag next to
> the language name to make it easier to identify the right one.
>

And I am quite thankful for this work. Although Zeta's looked nicer. Flags
should be bigger.


> The fact that Haiku (and BeOS) can be installed in just 3 clicks (1 select
> partition, 2 click install, 3 click reboot) makes a very good impression
> on users. The more questions you ask there, the more likely users will
> get lost. Note that on a live CD, where these settings can't be stored,
> you will be asked all the questions, everytime.  So I don't think it's a
> good idea to add more settings there. Once people get started with
> Haiku, they will take time to set things up properly, but first, we need
> to show them how simple it is. I don't know how much time an users spend
> in Haiku the first time they run it, but making them spend more of it in
> configuration dialogs doesn't sound like a good idea. Rather use this
> time to show off what we can do and let them discover the settings
> dialog a bit latter. This also means the settings are available in only
> one place, avoiding questions like 'when I first ran Haiku, I saw a
> dialog with some useful settings, now I want to change something and I
> can't find it again'.


Most OS's these days, Windows 7, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, et all have a first run
setup that pops up for these kind of settings. I don't see why Haiku should
be different, after all, once the one-time settings are set, you never need
to go back to it ever again. It also is useful for managing the out-of-box
experience of the OS, introducing concepts and settings to users new to the
OS. I could see how this would be quite annoying for development though,
so, that's why I suggest we skip the first boot setup for non-release
builds.

John Scipione

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