Deletion of strings in Launchpad by accident

[Ask Hjorth Larsen]

Hi translators

Here is an issue which has annoyed several of the translators in my
team, including myself.

Let us say that you are translating.  You want to perform some action
such as looking up a word.  This probably involves a shortcut key from
the browser, e.g. to go to the adjacent workspace.  Now, when you
press the key, Launchpad will immediately activate the text field of
the current entry (if you haven't done any editing yet on this page,
the 'current' entry will be the top entry on the current page).  Most
people wouldn't notice that the text field is suddenly active for no
apparent reason, so they return to the browser window, scroll down (or
maybe they had already scrolled down and had no chance at all to spot
the problem) and edit some of the strings further down the page.  When
accepting and going to the next page - oops - the first entry is
overwritten with an empty string.

So how frequently does this happen?  Let's say you are reviewing -
there are already many translated entries.  On every page you probably
need to check something (since we're doing the nitpicky review process
and want to be sure about everything).  In practice that means a at
least couple of strings are deleted every time someone reviews
something.  Sometimes long strings.

Telling translators that, 'oops, we deleted your strings, our bad'
gets old *really* quickly.  Would it be possible to disable this
function that activates a text field if you hit the multitasking  - or
indeed any - buttons?

Best regards
Ask Hjorth Larsen