Hey, Les!<br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>
I may have spoken about Guitar Zero on the list before. The program is an interactive ChucK program for practicing guitar. I have made major updates to it<snip></blockquote><div><br>This is lovely. I don't play the guitar but I like seeing people make musical games.<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">It seems that international keyboards such as a British or Belgian or German keyboard are handled improperly by ChucK and they can't use the menu options properly.</blockquote>
<div><br>This is the bit I wanted to reply to. I use big IBM keyboards nearly all the time, I have two; one for my laptop and one for my desktop, these have a Dutch layout. My laptop (like nearly all, these days, it seems) has a US layout and so I occasionally have to use that as well.<br>
<br>I haven't found a case where ChucK didn't handle both "properly". Clearly there are differences, differences that can make things tricky, like for example the extra key between the "Z" and the left shift or the three keys between the "L" and the "Enter" that the Dutch ones have and the US one lacks. This can be inconvenient, even confusing but I didn't encounter a case where I felt ChucK's behaviour wasn't "proper". Because of the way I tend to use the keyboard in musical interfaces I'm more interested in key location then I'm in the label on the key, I found that my_key_msg.which() typically refers to the same location on both (where possible) so I use that one most often. If your application requires certain messages based on the labeling I'd use the ascii value instead, those keys that don't have one (like shift or ctrl) should be the same for msg.which(). This can take some fidgeting and I realise this may be hard to write for if you lack keyboards with those layouts.<br>
<br>There are many things about keyboards that we might call "improper". I for example feel that nearly all modern ones lack "proper" tactile feedback for typing and I don't like branding on keys either; few people seem to feel that way. I realise I'm in a extremely small minority to prefer a Dutch layout; to me anything else doesn't feel "proper" as that's what I'm used to, like you are used to a US layout. We can blame lots of people; we can blame keyboard manufacturers, we can blame governments for not yet having designed a single language for all of the world to use (I suspect a loby by professional interpreters and weapon builders who are benefiting from the confusion ;¬) )... but I also suspect this is one of the rare cases where we can't blame ChucK.<br>
<br>That is, of course, unless you can point out a case where ChucK could have done better that I missed. I think poor ChucK is simply suffering from the same issue that we all have; a lack of standards and of languages differing. It's not ChucK's fault that English doesn't use characters like the "ß" or "ü", which is without even going into the ones used by Chinese, Russian or Japanese.<br>
</div></div><br>I hope that either clarifies the situation or will encourage you to explain what I missed so far, maybe German keyboards do terrible things, like sending different signals for the cursor keys; I never tried one.<br>
<br>Yours,<br>Kas.<br>