Maliit, Plasma Active and Mer

[Marco Martin]

Hi all,
first of all sorry for the big cross posting but is a topic that is important 
to all 3 lists.

As we discussed on irc a couple of times, in the Plasma Active project we 
would like to use Maliit as system for the virtual keyboard.

Now that i had a bit of time to play with it, i got a plasma-themed qml 
keyboard that we can use and results so far can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZs-RPyF9zE

As base system we use Mer, which at the moment has Maliit 0.8 packaged, and as 
noted it had some bugs, besides the support for qml keyboards being still a 
bit at early stages:
http://ppenz.blogspot.it/2012/04/plasma-active-and-maliit.html


So, i tried to package the current git revision here:
https://build.pub.meego.com/project/show?project=home%3Amart%3Abranches%3ACE%3AMW%3AShared


in order to correctly package the thing, and to have a fully functional qml 
keyboard i had to put a few patches into maliit-framework, of which i would 
like to upstream those who make sense and if there are some incorrect ones to 
get them right and upstream.

* build out-of-tree: the maalit-glib folder didn't build if the build is done 
outside the source directory, this patch fixes it.
Related issue: if the build is done inside the tree on obs it doesn't build on 
arm (possible qemu issue?) when in the sdk folder make clean is called, it 
fails on that architecture.

* resize the qgraphicsview at start: this patch looks quite strange but seems 
to be necessary: if the qgraphicsview is not resized to the desktop size right 
after it's created it will stay the wrong size (displaying only a piece of the 
keyboard)

* keep scenerect focused: this patch fixes the problem that after some times 
that the keyboard is opened and closed, the scenerect of the qgraphicsview 
drifts a bit (didn't find the real reason) so the keyboard appears moved down 
offscreen of 100 pixels or so

* remove the -as-needed linker option: with this option in the linker any 
application that doesn't explicitly link to libmaliit won't be able to use it 
(the plugin load fails with an unresolved symbol on libmaliit) that's why the 
keyboard worked with the examples but not with plain qt applications


The actual keyboard seen in the video is derived from the nemo keyboard plugin 
but quite modified, besides using plasma for the visual theme has some feature 
that may be useful to port it back to the nemo keyboard as well, if someone is 
interested (accents popup on long press, changing the pressed button when 
moving the finger around the keyboard)


That's it for now, it's quite a lot of stuff, various items can be discussed 
one by one ;)

Cheers,
Marco Martin
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