[sugar] FW: Touchpad XO

[Eben Eliason]

> Nintendo uses  the letters "ABCD", and the change they recently decided
> to make was to make the A big and green and in the middle, so there was
> never any doubt about which button to press to get started.

I'm agreed with you on this point, but as Mary Lou mentioned, we can't
change the physical size or shape of the keys at this point, however
unfortunate.

> It would be cute to use "X" and "O" for the buttons, because it's the
> name of the laptop,  and they map nicely to "Cancel" and "OK". But you
> have a point that there are already "X" and "O" buttons which might
> cause confusion. Does that rule out all letters and numbers and symbols
> on the keyboard? How about geometric shapes (other than the set
> identical to Sony's)?

The Sony thing is a problem, but it's also frustrating because our
whole logic is to provide symbols which are a) easily distinguishable
and b) cross-cultural (without requiring localization)  Geometric
shapes are the obvious answer - they're a universal language - but
what do you do when the primitive shapes of circle, square and
triangle are already taken?  Pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, and octagon
aren't so distinguishable.

At any rate, one of the recent ideas was to have an 'x' and a 'check'
for two of them, which would always map to confirmation and cancel
type interactions, and a circle and square for the other two.  Even
without swapping triangle for check, would rearranging the shapes be
enough to eliminate any type of legal ramifications?

- Eben