Russian Keyboard on translit.ru site

Site http://translit.ru which offers Cyrillic typing tools for the situations like "I want to type Russian in the business center of my hotel while on business trip or vacation", has - in addition to the main page of "conversion of translit combinations" - another page, with a Virtual Russian Keyboard.
At the moment (April 2008) the address of that page on that site is http://translit.ru/keyboard.

The goal of any Virtual Keyboard is to provide a person far from home a way of typing that would be as close as posisble to the way s/he types at home, that is, nothing to learn jusy sit down and start typing "as at home".

The differences between the above Virtual Keyboard and mine at http://Kbd.WinRus.com:

• Keyboard at translit.ru offers only Standard "йцукен" layouts
  (where by the way the 2nd - "Russian Typewriter" - is incorrectly implemented in its 1st row, see http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/keyboards.mspx)

  But there are thousands of people all around the world - both native speakers and say members of AATSEEL who - as I saw zillion times in forums - just can NOT use Standard Russian layout "йцукен" - they don't know such layout at all and would NOT be able to use such Virtual Keyboard that offers only Standard layout:
  more than 40 symbols are on UNknown for such people positions.
  They say in forums, that it would take them 10 minutes to type a short sentence and it's unacceptable:

  • all 33 Russian letters are on 'strange' positions for a person who knows well Latin layout ('A' - on the button with 'F', 'T' - on the button with 'N", etc)
  • all (often used!) punctuation marks (comma, period, colon, etc.) - not on those positions as during Latin input

  Those people use - at home - Phonetic layout for Russian where Russian letters occupy 'easy-to-remember' positions:
  A-A, O-O, T-T, E-E, Б-B, Д-D, Ф-F, К-К,...

  Again, it's not just my personal opinion, but from many forums - such people, being outside of their own computer also want to type
  "as I get used to, as at home" - as can do people who use at home one of two Standard layouts.

  Outside of former USSR both layouts - Standard and Phonetic - are absolutely equal - a person could choose either one, thus users of both layouts must have a tool "outside of home - type as at gome".

  Absence of Phonetic layouts is a very bad usability feature (the luck of) of many Virtual Keyboards available nowadays on the Web.

• There is no Ukrainian input support there

• It offers only two "system keyboard modes while using Virtual Keyboard" - US English and German.
  Mine supports British English, Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish, French, Hebrew

  What is that? See explanation using link "If your system keyboard is not in the US English mode" on http://Kbd.WinRus.com

• Virtual Keyboard on translit.ru shuts down all ways of input Cyrillic when you choose such option by pressing Esc or via the image's button. It's bad, a person may be wants just to type "thank you" in Russian, "спасибо" and nothing else...
  On my Virtual Keyboard mouse-based input works all the time, Esc shuts down only keyboard-driven Cyrillic input.
  It's also handy when a user has unsupported mode - say Polish or Latvian, then s/he can type some Cyrillic using mouse while typing latin text.

  Also, when Cyrillic inout shuts down on that Virtual Keyboard on translit.ru they live an image with latin letters only - but it has nothing with reality - a user may have Spanish or French mode while on the screen s/he sees either US English or German...

Again, new tools are often better than older ones, right? Especially in this case when that new Virtual Keyboard at http://Kbd.WinRus.com was done only after careful analysis of many older tools and was placed - for purpose - under tough tests by end users in many forums in different countries...