Comment 8 for bug 1234982

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 8:14 PM, Rodney Dawes <email address hidden>
wrote:

> On Tue, 2014-06-24 at 15:43 +0000, Zsombor Egri wrote:
> > @Rodney: if you take iOS Messaging app for instance, tapping on static
> > areas does not close the OSK. in Calendar, when creating an event,
> > tapping on static area doesn't close the OSK. OTOH, scrolling the screen
> > does close OSK, which ultimately also means taking the focus away from
> > the input. And that is also linked to control (component) focusing.
>
> Are we talking about iOS or Ubuntu? I don't have any iOS devices in
> front of me, and I've never really used any, so I can't see what iOS
> does in various apps with the keyboard. Android has an explicit close
> button on the keyboard.
>

iOS doesn't have one on phone layout, but on tablets they have. But you can
still hide the OSK on phone by swiping/dragging it down.

>
> Why should we do exactly what iOS or Android do here? Why can't we be
> better than both of them? An explicit close button would be much better
> than what we have now in most places, as it can be annoyingly difficult
> to close the keyboard at times. Trying to close the keyboard when search
> is focused in a scope for example, I shouldn't have to open an app to
> result in the keyboard being closed. It also makes scrolling extra
> annoying, as the keyboard is on top of the app, and doesn't cause the
> app window to be resized to fit the keyboard underneath it in a tiled
> fashion. This means that some things (which may need to be viewed in
> some cases), can be very difficult to see, when one also needs to use
> the keyboard at the same time.
>

Noone sais we should do exactly the same way. The reason I took iOS as
example is that they have a proven UX that works and people got used to it.
So Android. Usually, when a new UI framework, UX pattern is created, you
take ideas from other UI frameworks, taste their UX, and then build own
one. I'm not saying that they (iOS or Android) do always the best way, what
I'm trying to say is that they have certain UX patterns which are kind of
obvious for end users, or at least became obvious for some end-users. Yes,
I know, there are exceptions, and people don't always like everything these
frameworks provide, and we should address those people. Things like tapping
on a static area to close OSK is not something people would expect to have.
And you are right, opening an app is definitely not the way to dismiss OSK.
However resizing app window when OSK is opened may not be the best to do,
but the active input should definitely be pushed above the OSK. That is
already doable with the toolkit.

>
> There are several significant usability issues with the current
> behavior, and with the iOS keyboard (which is why there are thousands of
> threads on the Internet of people asking how to add a close button to
> it). It would be nice if we could avoid these pitfalls in Ubuntu.
>

Yeps, I second to that.