Comment 27 for bug 739812

@Neil, comment #24, could you elaborate what you discussed with Sam and Jason?

Francesco and me have been discussing this bug too and to us the window-type DOCK approach (or alternatively marking onboard "override-redirect") seems feasible. The main obstacle appears to be missing window decoration, but I have been working on making decoration optional anyway. There are "move", "hide" and "quit" buttons in an upstream branch already. What's missing is a replacement for window resizing.

There are more quirks though, loss of screen edge snapping and onboard can be positioned over the top panel. So if you have a better approach let us know please.

There is one other option. Onboard and other osks support the XEmbed extension. Gnome-screensaver and since recently lightdm use this to embed onboard (or other osks, cellwriter) into their windows. If unity supported that, onboard and others could already be made transients of dash.
That is more of a long term vision though and unity would probably have to be modified with on-screen keyboards in mind, e.g. having a "keyboard dock" at the botton of the screen or something.