On Tue, 18 Feb 2003, Rob Taylor wrote: > Here's a mail that's been sitting in my outbox for a while: its' still > relevent so forwarding to Xfree86 Devel. > > -----Original Message----- > From: Rob Taylor [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: 04 February 2003 13:49 > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RE: [Xpert]2 mice -> 2 pointer ?!? > > > I'm replying to this a bit late on in the day, but i thought i'd give a more > concrete example where more than one on-screen pointer is needed. > > We have a product that can have up to 4 touch screens and has a track-ball > controlled pointer. Iften people operate the product in a two-handed manner, > and occasionally more than one operator will use the product at a given > time. the upshot of this is that ideally there would be a pointer for the > trackball that isn't effected by touchscreen presses, and separate invisible > pointers for each of the touchscreens. > > The setup is currently impossible in Xfree86.
I'm beginning to understand what you want here. I don't think you really need pointers for the touch-screens; just events when they are pressed. I haven't checked, but I think that one of the standard extensions (perhaps XInputExtension) should be able to do that for you. At some level this isn't really a mouse click; if you want standard apps to behave as if they received a mouse-click, then you want a wrapper app to convert touch-screen presses into synthetic events sent to the standard app (perhaps indirectly via the window manager). > Another concrete example is when implementing a collaborative decktop in > whcih you want a separate pointer for each of the users remotely viewing > that desktop. Are you going to let them type into different windows at the same time ? That really would be two pointers. However I think that should be done by the collaboration software, not by X. I'm not convinced that two pointers are a good idea on a collaborative desktop, forcing the participants to share a pointer helps them to share their focus. Without it they could easily each do their own thing and stop watching what the other one is doing: a good way to reduce the efficiency of the collaboration ? VNC draws a "dot" cursor to indicate when the pointers at the two ends are out of sync, to make it clear to the remote user that the local user hasn't yet seen what the remote user is pointing at. And don't forget that most current graphics cards only have one hardware cursor. -- Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
