On Mon, Apr 29, 2002 at 05:17:38PM +0200, Pascal Bauermeister wrote:
> Hello Micah and everybody,
> 
> one of our products (the low-end one) will have no touchscreen, but
> function keys.
> 
> We intend to place a row of unlabelled physical buttons just under the
> screen, and display the labels on the screen. Much like some HP
> calculators (HP28, HP48, etc.).
> 
> Having this capability will surely interest guys hacking (wanting to
> hack) pg apps on car radios, oscilloscopes, field devices... :-)

Yep. I did something like this, but app-specific, for Exadigm.

> 
> A toolbar application (let's name it 'pgbtnbar') that we intend to write
> (sharing some similarities with pgboard) would display these buttons.
> 
> An application intending to use the button bar would have to do it
> explicitly, by passing a button map to pgbtnbar, which will stack these
> maps.
> 
> A map could consist of a list of pairs, each pair being a string and an
> id. Pgbtnbar would care for sacrificing one button for horizontal
> scrolling if necessary.
> 
> Some issues need a solution:
>         * The exchange protocol between pgbtnbar and the applications. I
>           think it would be nice to have it go via pgserver (i.e.
>           app<->pgserver<->pgbtnbar and not app<->pgbtnbar )

pgAppMessage should work fine for this

>         * Having (via an option) the standard dialogs use pgbtnbar

This should be straightforward. Unless someone comes up with a more elegant solution, 
this could be done with a compile-time option.

>         * The focus from widget to widget (e.g. PG_WIDGET_FIELD) could
>           be controlled by pgbtnbar, as well as scrolling inside a
>           widget: pgserver would, as necessary, give pgbtnbar a special
>           map, that pgbtnbar would merge to the current map.

The focus shouldn't be hard to do. I'm not sure what you mean about the maps

> 
> All this require some work in pgserver and in the client lib too. I have
> no doubts about the feasibility, but I'd like to hear your opinion about
> how it could be implemented.

I'd bet the client lib wouldn't even need to be modified, assuming I manage to move 
the standard dialogs into the server :)

> 
>   Pascal.
> 
> 
> --
> Pascal Bauermeister 
> Head of Software Development
> 
> SMARTDATA
> PSE-A / EPFL
> CH-1015 Lausanne
> 
> http://www.smartdata.ch
> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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> fax: +41 (21) 693 84 91
> 
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