Ragnar wants science applied to this subject, so we'll give him a scientific poll. Hey, I'm a professional data analyst; I'm qualified!

If you're so qualified... didn't you just forget the poll?

EDIT: Never mind... it just showed up...

Consider yourself virtually slapped with a trout.

Democratic polling does not ensure good usability any more than a "democratic election" ensures selecting a good leader.

(All taken with good humour: my general experience is that democracy in design = committees = least common denominators = too many cooks = everybody wants something = compromises.)

If you ask users that would they possibly like to have feature A, would they appreciate it and use it, their initial answers really have rather little correlation to how they actually behave once feature A (alongside all the other features) gets implemented. There are too many complex features in products because people think that somebody might eventually use them. And even if 10% would, the 90% that won't use them get bogged down by the complexity that having these extra features create. Not to mention the time and effort spent in implementation, maintenance, legacy requirements that they eventually create etc., all slowing down a process that could potentially create something more worthwhile.

For a feature like this - take this with a grain of salt, there are naturally exceptions to this rule, relating mostly to new ideas - since the idea is fairly obvious, since touch screen devices have been around for a number of years now - if it would really "work well", then it would have already been implemented to some device and gained popularity in that device. At least I fail to know any such device.

I voted "Absolutely" But I would rather some work on the email client

All that said, ragnar, note how the poll question was worded. A transparency setting could support a gradient of values, from NONE to virtually invisible. The default could, of course, be NONE.

Which really makes the one "O hell no" response a little amusing to me. Don't want an available option? Don't use it.

Well?

EDIT: and if we abided by the "it hasn't been implemented yet so it's not viable" logic, you might not have a job right now. Seriously, why not be the first to MAKE it work? I also believe I saw one poster a while back show an example of it being implemented on some device...

Ok! Here's my idea - make it so that you can control with + and - the transparency gradient while the keyboard is onscreen!

Brainstorm ftw!

ah c'mon! what about the 770?

I'm loving the Osso-xterm with transparent keyboard. I wish I could use it in more places, though.

Absolutly not ... virtual thumboard is already too slow to display ...

Just about a second here. You have something really screwed up if it's longer on your device.

I voted Absolutely too. This would be killer feature for Pidgin. Often when i finish writing i see a couple of messages received while I has been typing and sometimes I have to go back, edit and change my point. Very inconvinient.