Thumb-Key installed on a relative's 'phone.
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Thumb-Key installed on a relative's 'phone. I didn't enable anything fancy, or enable the #MessageEase compatibility layouts. But I was explicitly asked to install Spanish and French alongside English.
I made the relative make the layout switching gesture multiple times, so that it stuck. Otherwise I knew what the first panicked 'phone call would be.
First panicked 'phone call: all of the letters have disappeared from the keyboard.
There is a setting in the Thumb-Key settings called "Hide letters", and it had been switched on.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.dessalines.thumbkey/
There's another option called 'show toast' and is a prime example of programmers writing for programmers instead of for users. 'toast' is specialized Android developer jargon. Users won't know that it means showing the layout names for a brief period when one switches layouts. They'll be wondering what the Hell bread has to do with a keyboard.
#ThumbKey #Android #SoftwareDevelopment #ComputerProgramming
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Thumb-Key installed on a relative's 'phone. I didn't enable anything fancy, or enable the #MessageEase compatibility layouts. But I was explicitly asked to install Spanish and French alongside English.
I made the relative make the layout switching gesture multiple times, so that it stuck. Otherwise I knew what the first panicked 'phone call would be.
First panicked 'phone call: all of the letters have disappeared from the keyboard.
There is a setting in the Thumb-Key settings called "Hide letters", and it had been switched on.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.dessalines.thumbkey/
There's another option called 'show toast' and is a prime example of programmers writing for programmers instead of for users. 'toast' is specialized Android developer jargon. Users won't know that it means showing the layout names for a brief period when one switches layouts. They'll be wondering what the Hell bread has to do with a keyboard.
#ThumbKey #Android #SoftwareDevelopment #ComputerProgramming
@JdeBP The point about developers using developer language is a real problem, I as someone pretty techy would struggle to know what a toast is in this context because I don't use Android or any tech that regularly uses that language.
I'm all for there being developer oriented settings hidden away in a developer settings menu but things we want normal users to change or edit need to be readable by the average person rather than needing to know exactly how the app is expected to work first
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@JdeBP The point about developers using developer language is a real problem, I as someone pretty techy would struggle to know what a toast is in this context because I don't use Android or any tech that regularly uses that language.
I'm all for there being developer oriented settings hidden away in a developer settings menu but things we want normal users to change or edit need to be readable by the average person rather than needing to know exactly how the app is expected to work first
I've seen it at work several times in my career.
Unlike the relative, I recognized that this was jargon and knew where to look the jargon up.
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/toasts
The setting actually is not actually developer oriented. It's aimed, like the "hide letters" setting, at people who know the tool and who can (or at least want to) get by without the visual aids.
It's even something that I've directly experienced. Change layout multiple times to get to the desired point in the layout loop, and the names of all of the layouts passed through take significant time to all, one by one, flash on screen and disappear.
#ThumbKey #SoftwareDevelopment #ComputerProgramming #Android
