Andrej Tozon's blog

In the Attic

NAVIGATION - SEARCH

Windows Phone 8 and our “localized” keyboard layout

This is a rant (somewhat).

Windows 8 features a nicely convenient on-screen keyboard, which is mostly useful when using on a touch device, like a tablet. I’m quite often using it on my Surface, when my touch cover is not attached.

Now, let’s take a look at a Slovenian layout of this keyboard:

win8keyboard

The keyboard layout is QUERTZ, with South Slavic layout, standardized in the 80’s and used in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and other (at that time) republics of former Yugoslavia. That means there are five additional letters on there. Letters č, š and ž (circled green) are part of all South Slavic alphabets, while đ and ć (circled red) are not in Slovenian alphabet.

Although this is a Slovenian keyboard layout, the presence of non-Slovenian characters is far from annoying or discomforting – besides the fact that there are also other (English) characters present, we’re used to this layout and have adopted it a long time ago, plus sometimes those characters come in rather handy.

But again, those red characters are not part of Slovenian language and that’s why I was surprised to see the Slovenian on-screen keyboard on my Windows Phone 8 (taken on my Nokia Lumia 920):

wp8keyboard1

It struck me weird that Microsoft would, out of five Slavic characters, pick the two that are not part of the Slovenian alphabet.

Taking another look at the above Windows 8 keyboard layout - notice how š and č are right next to  p and l? Wouldn’t it be natural to take this exact layout  to the Phone keyboard? So now, out of 28 letters on Windows Phone keyboard, there are 6 of them that aren’t in Slovenian alphabet – q, w, y, x (English), and ć, đ (Croatian/Serbian Latin/Bosnian).

Weird.

Of course, you can also (besides typing a combo of c and ˇ) access all letters by pressing and holding down the base letter, which gives you more options – and - behold č as the first option:

wp8keyboard2

Weird.

Fix please?

Announcing a new user group

Dear Slovenian developers and UI enthusiasts, mark your calendars for 8th of November 2011 as that’s the day we’re launching a new user group targeting the UI/UX professionals.

SIUX LogoSIUX – Slovenian UX User Group – a sister user group (or a Siamese twin group as we fondly call it Smile) of now years-running SLODUG, Slovenian Developers User Group (SLODUG), where we’ll focus on technologies and areas like WPF, Silverlight, HTML5, Kinect, Windows Phone, Windows 8; talk through their visual and interaction design aspects; explore user interface examples, usability and related factors.

SLODUG and SIUX will share their members and meeting place. As mentioned, the first, inaugural meeting, will take place on Tuesday, 8th of November 2011, starting at 17h. Two talks are scheduled for the meeting: Developing for XBox Kinect by Sašo Zagoranski and Metro: the UI of the future?  by me. The meeting will take place in Microsoft Lecture room at Šmartinska 140.

Full agenda:

17:00: Intro & announcements
17:15 – 18:00: Developing for XBox Kinect, Sašo Zagoranski / Semantika d.o.o.
18:15 – 19:00: Metro: UI of the future?, Andrej Tozon / ANT Andrej Tozon s.p.
19:00: Discussion over pizza &  beer

We’re also looking for speakers – if you’re interested or  know anybody from the field, please contact me and we’re schedule your talk in one of our next meetings.

Hope to see you!

Until then, you can follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook group.



NT Konferenca 2010 – Where you’ll find me

This year’s NT Konferenca is starting next week! Organized by local Microsoft, it will be held (for the 15th year in a row!) in beautiful Portoroz (Slovenia), that’s now become a traditional venue for this event. Over 130 sessions, labs and seminars will be delivered by over 130 speakers in only four days – that’s a lot of content.

I’ll be speaking (and discusing things) on the following conference sessions:

Tuesday, 25th

10:15 – 11:30 Silverlight and MEF
11:45 – 12:30 ASP.NET, WebForms, Silverlight – What to choose? [BoF session, co-hosting with @dusanzu]

Wednesday, 26th

10:15 – 11:30 Silverlight and WCF RIA Services
11:45 – 12:30 Tips & Tricks: Expression Blend For Developers [Tips & Tricks session, co-presenting with @krofdrakula]
13:30 – 14:15 What’s new in Silverlight 4?
16:30 – 17:30 MVP Panel [A panel discussion with all Slovenian MVPs]

See any theme/pattern here? ;)

You can follow me and my whereabouts next week through twitter [@andrejt], with the official conference hashtag being #ntk10.

See you next week…



NT Konferenca 2010 – Where you’ll find me

This year’s NT Konferenca is starting next week! Organized by local Microsoft, it will be held (for the 15th year in a row!) in beautiful Portoroz (Slovenia), that’s now become a traditional venue for this event. Over 130 sessions, labs and seminars will be delivered by over 130 speakers in only four days – that’s a lot of content.

I’ll be speaking (and discusing things) on the following conference sessions:

Tuesday, 25th

10:15 – 11:30 Silverlight and MEF
11:45 – 12:30 ASP.NET, WebForms, Silverlight – What to choose? [BoF session, co-hosting with @dusanzu]

Wednesday, 26th

10:15 – 11:30 Silverlight and WCF RIA Services
11:45 – 12:30 Tips & Tricks: Expression Blend For Developers [Tips & Tricks session, co-presenting with @krofdrakula]
13:30 – 14:15 What’s new in Silverlight 4?
16:30 – 17:30 MVP Panel [A panel discussion with all Slovenian MVPs]

See any theme/pattern here? ;)

You can follow me and my whereabouts next week through twitter [@andrejt], with the official conference hashtag being #ntk10.

See you next week…



This blog’s address changed

I broke most of the external referrals to my blog posts when moving to a new blog engine, so why not take this opportunity to change my blog’s address as well?

From now on, the official address of this blog is http://tozon.info/blog/ The old address will remain functional and I will do my best to catch and properly redirect all referring links to my blog posts that now end up in an error page.

The main RSS feed remains the same, again, thanks to FeedBurner.