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Concrete problems and generic solutions
For the official Gnome3 virtual keyboard, one can notice how the space bar is strangely sized, how the regular keys are unpleasantly square and how the enter and backspace keys are way too small. They all use the same graphical asset. For the Gnome3 styled Maliit Keyboad, the letters d-j, x-n, together with the space bar and its neighboring keys, form a neatly aligned center area, with a staircase pattern to each side of the keyboard. If you look in the last row, you will notice that the space bar is just a few pixels too large. This happens because the only non-pixel-perfect elements in the Maliit Keyboard are stretched keys and spacer elements, and I somehow still compute their width incorrectly. From a designer perspective, that “pixel bug” in the layout destroys the immersion of an otherwise good design. Pixel perfectness — whilst having a poor reputation among us developers perhaps — is actually quite a challenge to get right!
Maliit Keyboard is a reimplementation of the MeeGo Keyboard that was shipped on the Nokia N9. It doesn’t share any code with it, but it does reuse the ideas and the XML layout files. The format for the layout files evolved from programmer-friendly to designer-friendly over time, which I think was a good change. Instead of using the complex and pretty generic styling system of libmeegotouch (which was intended to fit the needs of any mobile application), I use a concrete style class that reads a styling profile folder, looks into into the two INI files (one for the main keyboard area, one for the extended keys) and fills a model with style attributes. In the given context of virtual keyboard styling, the concrete solution offers the same flexibility as the generic solution but comes with a fraction of the implementation complexity and remains simple to extend. This is because the concrete solution fits the intended use-case perfectly, whereas a generic solution will always acrue overhead.
The trade-off, of course, is that for a new use-case, I’d probably have to write a new style class and create new style attributes. It is very unlikely, however, that the styling requirements of a fairly specific “application” would fit the the styling requirements of a regular application, so why burden myself with a generic enough abstraction that I will never use? Inversely, why try to make a generic solution fit a specialised problem? Jokingly, that’s precisely what I call Java programming: Instead of solving the problem at hand, write a framework that can solve all similar problems. I have started to grow a strong aversion against that, not because I like reinventing the wheel (I don’t), but because I think that understanding the concepts behind an idea is far more valuable than clinching to an implementation of it.
For the Maliit Keyboard, I took the concepts of the libmeegotouch styling system and mixed my understanding of CSS with the XML layout files. The result feels pretty clean and easy to use, but that’s because I based the implementation on well-understood concepts, not because of the implementation itself. Who knows, if I keep myself busy with implementing virtual keyboards for just a bit longer, I should eventually be able to write a pretty decent book about VKB design patterns ;–)
