Progress report

[John Brownie]

Sorry for the silence in recent weeks! I got ambitious, and updated some core code that parsed the binary form of KCAP resources, which define physical keyboard layouts, to use the newer XML format that I’ve built for the long-delayed new version of Ukelele. That took much longer than I had anticipated, chasing down a bunch of problems and doing a lot of geometrical calculations for specifying how keys react to changes of scale and so on.

Since I’d gone that far, I added a button to allow importing of user-defined keyboards, which again took a lot of effort that I didn’t expect. So far, it only allows you to import a file in a specific format, a property list with a particular structure. The hope is that one day there will be a way to generate those other than with a text editor that can save as an XML property list (like Xcode, BBEdit, and the like).

Anyway, it’s all looking good to me at this point, so I expect to release a beta version of 3.6 soon. The timing isn’t the best, as I’ve got holiday next week and then an international trip in March, but hopefully in the next couple of days!

John

[Gé van Gasteren]

In short: Wow!

I’ve gotten used to it, but my keyboard is a mix of ISO and ANSI, meaning that with this new development, I may be able to finally get all the keys showing in the right places in Ukelele!

But I’ll keep the current Ukelele version around for some time, just in case… :-)

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[Sheik Yerbouty]

I felt a little guilty when I metioned the printing bug just before christmas and you jumped right on it. 'Am I making this guy work during christmas??'

Now that you're working on a lot more features than just the printing bug, I feel less guitlty, thanks. 😀

Take your time, current Ukelele works great! The only impact a developer should feel when making FREE software is satisfaction, not stress! Release it whenever you feel it's ready.

About the beta, where will this be released, google groups? Would love to be able to give feedback as a way to say thanks for all the work you do.

about: "user-defined keyboards"

Not sure what you mean. Do you mean we will be able to define the structure of a keyboard like a corne keyboard and see it visually in Ukelele?

corne keyboard images

[John Brownie]

On 20 Feb 2025 at 13:32:48, Sheik Yerbouty <sheik...@gmail.com> wrote:

I felt a little guilty when I metioned the printing bug just before christmas and you jumped right on it. 'Am I making this guy work during christmas??'

Now that you're working on a lot more features than just the printing bug, I feel less guitlty, thanks. 😀

No problem. It was good to work out some bugs I hadn’t known about.

Take your time, current Ukelele works great! The only impact a developer should feel when making FREE software is satisfaction, not stress! Release it whenever you feel it's ready.

I doubt it will be this week, hopefully next week. Otherwise it will be April!

About the beta, where will this be released, google groups? Would love to be able to give feedback as a way to say thanks for all the work you do.

There will be an announcement on this group, and it will be on the Ukelele page of the SIL Software web site. Auto-update should also show it as an option.

about: "user-defined keyboards"

Not sure what you mean. Do you mean we will be able to define the structure of a keyboard like a corne keyboard and see it visually in Ukelele?

corne keyboard images

It’s more limited than that, in that it will allow a grid of rectangles (usually most of them are squares) to show keys, though you can have two rectangles that touch each other to handle some Return keys. All of the rectangles are restricted to horizontal and vertical edges, so no angled keys like those corne keyboards have.

The plan is to have a sample keyboard as part of the distribution, and a short guide on how to write one. An actual app would be better, but there’s no time for that right now.

John

[Gé van Gasteren]

"The plan is to have a sample keyboard as part of the distribution, and a short guide on how to write one. An actual app would be better, but there’s no time for that right now."

I think that’s plenty, as that will be a natural deterrent, so only people ready to go the extra mile will embark.

If this takes off, we could have a thread in the group where people can upload their creations, for others to use.

The main thing now would be to have Ukelele resilient to bad-format keyboard definitions, as I think I’m going to try my luck with this ;-)

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[Sorin Paliga]

On 21 Feb 2025, at 11:58, Gé van Gasteren <gevang...@gmail.com> wrote:

If this takes off, we could have a thread in the group where people can upload their creations, for others to use.

I once uploaded them to macupdate.com. At a given moment, the links got corrupt, and moved them to my pages of the University of Bucharest. That idea turned ultimately bad, as the site had two successive revisions, and links got corrupt again!

So, yes, it would be a good idea to have a place where to put our keylayouts. mellel.com once had such a page, i.e. of custom keylayouts for various languages, but they removed it some time ago. 

[Gé van Gasteren]

Hi Sorin!

If the idea really takes off, I’m sure John will include them (or a selection) in Ukelele’s download files, as they aren’t large files.

In the meantime, I’d think the user group is the natural place, especially in the first stages, when there will be problems and questions.

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[Cliff G]

Hi all,

Thanks for the inspiring ideas all around. Perhaps GitHub for storage?  I currently store all my keyboard files in a cloud-based version control system. It is a little geeky, though.

Cheers,

Cliff