Please review: Virtual keyboard plasmoid - Plasmaboard

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 02 August 2009, Björn Ruberg wrote:
> after some final polishment I want you to have a look at plasmaboard in
> kdereview/plasma/applets/plasmaboard
> It's a virtual keyboard plasmoid made for every KDE user with a
> touchscreen.

cool; some initial comments/observations:

* there's a mix of whitespace usage in there; sometimes tabs are used to 
indent, sometimes spaces. your goal is kdeplasma-addons, so you aren't 
required to follow the kdelibs coding style (though you get extra cookies for 
doing so ;) but could you use just one formatting style? throughout the code

* the tab key, when pressed, just keeps pressing tab over and over :)

* lots of "magic numbers"; e.g. FuncKey *funcKeys[14] in the header file and 
then this in the implementation:

·       ·       i = 0;
·       ·       while ( i < 14 ) {
·       ·       ·       delete funcKeys[i];
·       ·       ·       i++;
·       ·       }

perhaps it makes sense to use a QVector here instead. that way you can replace 
the above with: 

	qDeleteAll(funcKeys);
	funcKeys.clear();

no magic numbers :)

* it'd be great if the keyboard modifier state was harmonized; e.g. if i press 
CAPS LOCK on my keyboard, it would set this on the virtual keyboard and vice 
versa. note that there is a "keystate" DataEngine that makes this all very 
easy and cross-platform (it has serviceForSource() which lets you modify the 
global state of modifiers)

* in FunkKey::toggleOn there is this:

·       Plasma::PushButton::setStyleSheet(oldStyle + "color:red;text-
align:center;"); // sorry, but I need some visual confirmation

that color should really be coming out of the Plasma::Theme::colorScheme so it 
works with all themes. in any case, i don't ever see the red color? is it 
really needed?

* the biggest challenge i see is that there's no support (that i could see?) 
for keyboard layouts. this will make our friends around the world sad. :) i 
can think of various ways of accomplishing this but probably the most sane one 
is to just follow xkb:

http://hektor.umcs.lublin.pl/~mikosmul/computing/articles/custom-keyboard-
layouts-xkb.html 

the upside to this is that we can just use what's already there and follow the 
system layout settings

> My last addition was this tooltip, which shows the key you last hit. That's
> probably no optimal solution but I failed finding a better one. If someone
> can give me some hints how I can implement a popup like on the iphone
> virtual keyboard, I'm thankful.

what sort of popup are thinking of or wanting? if you can give me a mockup or 
a screenshot, i'm sure we can make it happen ;)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software
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