Bugzilla – Bug 11525
key to switch back to alphabet keyboard should show appropriate case
Last modified: 2009-09-08 09:15:38 UTC
When in the numeric keyboard, the key to switch back to the alphabetic keyboard is "ABC". It should be "abc", which reflects the keys that the user actually will see.
The reason ABC is capitalized is so that: 123-& and ABC are the same height. Making the text "ABC" lower case seems forced. In addition, you will never see "ABC" when using the QWERTY so showing the appropriate case does not make sense.
I understand it may be visually more appealing, but it's confusing. My point is that when you touch the "ABC" button you can only type a b c. if it took you back to the capitalized keys, then it would be appropriate (in fact, that's what it should look like if you are going back to the capitalized keys). Needs to work for Cyrillic too.
One more thing: Our copy style is to use mixed case on selectable items. So the words "Space" and "Done" should be capitalized.
1. "Abc" indicating tile case is my proposal. 2. Is the mixed case a direction from Smart Design? If so, any text in the titlebar buttons would follow this as well, correct? In general lower case always looks better.
Re: 1 - "Abc" reads like a word to me. Hm... I think "abc" is clearer when indicating that this will take you back to the lower case keyboard. Re: 2 - No, we've used mixed case for years with all the strings in all our UIs. "Lower case always looks better" is a pretty strong statement. In this case, lower case is out of place, given the rest of the UI. i suspect that you'd find a book written in all lower case pretty difficult to read. :)
To clarify single words, spaced appropriately will always look cleaner in lower case. If you have a sentence then sure mixed case is standard. "Abc" "ABC" or "abc" is considered a symbol in this case, and I think we should treat it as such.
Last point, if we move to "abc" there is even more of a reason to keep "space" and "done" lowercase. The main take away is that the words are acting like icons or symbols. When you introduce groups of words like this using mixed case you get a skyline effect that is NOT desirable.
Created attachment 5004 [details] Ref artwork - Keyboard text shown in upper case
Created attachment 5005 [details] Ref artwork - Keyboard text shown in lower case
Created attachment 5006 [details] Ref artwork - Keyboard text shown in upper case (123-?)
Created attachment 5007 [details] Ref artwork - Keyboard text shown in lower case (123-?)
For documenting purposes the attached are versions of the keyboard using all lower case and case sensitive text. Dean will need to make final call...
my two cents: Space and Done with mixed case looks very wrong in the keyboard Full endorsement of Noah's comment #7. Skyline effect is a bad thing there. also, I should note that the numeric screen refs are slightly wrong in that I've now added a shift key to the left-most button on the third row (see bug 11547) and not to bugjack, but in those screen refs the backspace button has changed. Is that an actual asset change that's going to happen?
(In reply to comment #13) > my two cents: Space and Done with mixed case looks very wrong in the keyboard I agree. Lower case seems more appropriate. My only remaining nit with this, however, is that the 'done' key doesn't stand out enough. I think something like 'done>', or using a alternate text color would be better.
fixed, r5077