On screen keyboard thought

[Weng Xuetian]

Hi,
I'm the current maintainer of kimpanel in kdeplasma-addons. I'm also a
main developer of an another input method framework called fcitx
(http://code.google.com/p/fcitx), which is popular in China. Well I
have read some thing about the discussion between maliit and active
team, don't have time to catch up previous discussion/meeting at that
time though.

So for input method solution, there is already several things up to choose.

1. Classical desktop input method framework, including ibus, fcitx,
scim etc. (Pros, many language support, Cons, no touch support )

2. kimpanel (which including a plasmoid with a pure dbus protocol,
Only for UI, Pros, KDE integration, Cons still need a input method
framework to work)
And actually I also have a kimpanel implementation for gnome-shell.
https://github.com/csslayer/kimpanel-for-gnome-shell

3. Maliit (Framework, but actually lack of all over language support
of free software currently, I also have an N9 myself by the way).

There is some possible combination for all of this three things.
First things we need to take into account is, we can only use ONE
input method framework, since they are conflicts on the Qt plugin
side. But classical input method framework can be easy extend into
support maliit, actually I have try this for fcitx already, though
it's only a demo. (http://blip.tv/csslayer/fcitx-maliit-5737722)

I might just be a little selfish for introducing my little fcitx :P,
but actually it's the only one that support kcontrol module.
(http://github.com/fcitx/kcm-fcitx). I'm also to try my best to push
the integration between fcitx and KDE.

Back to the original topic, there can be some combination:
For the UI part:
1. Maliit as UI
2. kimpanel as UI (need to extend kimpanel with virtual keyboard support).

For the input method framework side
1. Mallit as input method framework, with classical desktop input method inside.
2. Maliit as input method framework, and input method (it has one im
call maliit keyboard, which can be extended)
3. Classical desktop as input method framework.

So what do active team think of this?

Regards