Re: IBus UI review

[Akira TAGOH]

Hi,

Thank you for your review. that would be good input to
improve it.

Let me have some comments where I can say something.

> >>>> On Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:24:09 -0500,
> >>>> "MC" == Matthias Clasen <mclasen(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
MC> Status icon

MC> - There is no way to switch back to "no input method" from the status
MC> icon. I have to press Ctrl-space to go back. Maybe add an "None" entry
MC> at the bottom of the menu ?

I'm not sure what you expect to "no input method" though, if
it's something like "Disable input method" at im-chooser, it
won't work as expected. probably imsettings applet may wants
to integrate the status icon with IM-specific operations
such as changing engines etc. or do you want a kind of
"English" entry as SCIM has? in either case that would be
better filing a bug to bugzilla.


MC> Toolbar

MC> - Why do input methods seem to fancy these weird undecorated floating
MC> toolbars ? Does it add anything that is not already present in the
MC> status icon ?

Yes, it does. and it's supposed to provide similar feature
in SCIM and IMs where is running at Windows say. which
provides facilities to change various conditions such as the
input-mode, style etc.

MC> - If we can't drop it, can there at least be a way to turn it off ?

That would be a good idea. please file a bug :)

MC> - The toolbar seems useless if "focus-follows-mouse" is turned on, since
MC> it becomes inactive on focus out. This also affects the status icon.

Indeed. there are same problem on SCIM too. do you have any
idea to get this working on even "focus-follows-mouse" mode?

MC> Menus

MC> - What is the plan, going forward, wrt to im-chooser ? I'd hate to have
MC> 2 input method related menuitems in the default install. My preference
MC> would be to not install the im-chooser by default, since it is only
MC> needed to switch back to 'legacy' frameworks.

And to "disable input method" too. since im-chooser is just
a frontend application for imsettings, we've tried to kick
it out from the dependencies chain, but we missed the way to
disable input method from GUI then. now applet could do that
but it's hidden by default as you suggested.

MC> - Alternatively, if we can't get rid of im-chooser by default, maybe
MC> ibus-setup should not have its own menu item (I notice that scim-setup
MC> doesn't have one either), since it is available via im-chooser.

I'd prefer this idea since other IMs follows that.

MC> - There is a mismatch between the menuitem and the ibus-setup window,
MC> both the window title and icon don't match the menu, as they should.

Can you file a bug for that?

MC> Preferences, General tab

MC> - "Aauto start IBus on session login" is very techno babble. Can we make
MC> that something like "Enable Input Methods" ? I don't think there is
any
MC> need to talk about sessions and autostart here.

Actually incomplete feature so far. since the environment
variables still needs to be set to get all things
working. and that feature doesn't take care of it. IMHO we
should drop it from preference to avoid any confusion.

MC> - Keyboard shortcuts: I would love to see these moved to the keyboard
MC> shortcuts capplet, which has support for handling application-defined
MC> shortcuts. As a bonus, you get automatic conflict handling. The one
MC> restriction is that currently, only one key-combination per action is
MC> possible. If having multiple is essential, you could either split it
MC> into "Trigger", "Alternative Trigger", "Second Alternative
Trigger", or
MC> file a bug and I'll look into enabling multiple shortcuts per action in
MC> the keybinding capplet

That sounds promising. I'd love to see that too :)

Cheers,
--
Akira TAGOH