Comment 7 for bug 1234982

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.

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.

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.