On Dec 29, 2007 3:48 PM, Jonathan Chayce Dickinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Can I tell you what I envisioned? > > I recently saw a new keyboard on the net, it had LCD screens on the keys > (yep, you heard me right). Now what if we were to support stuff like > that out of the box?
you're probably referring to this keyboard: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/ (not lcd but organic leds) i was actually thinking about the same thing a long time ago, good to know we're on the same frequency ;) The biggest problem is that we need a system which is flexible, and easy to work with.. You don't want everybody to require to define all their keys when they're building their application. Not to mention that we need to stay backwards compatible with normal keyboards because these simple keyboards will be with us for a looooong time.. especially with a price tag of 462.27$ / 371.40€ for a keyboard like that... you can buy an xbox360 for that! ;o) Maybe we should add a paypal link to the webpage.. then people could donate some cash so we can buy these keyboards... for research! ;o) but seriously.. I think we should have keymap files on disk for normal (old) keyboards, these are then loaded in a class which maps keys with unicode characters or commands.. Newer keyboards with displays on the keys could use the same class.. (maybe even initialize them with a keymap) but could modify the mappings at runtime.. We could associate certain images and names with commands and characters, this could not only be used to display the keys on these keyboards, but also could be usefull to display keys on screen if we want to. (all localized ofcourse) The real trick is defining key-combos and stuff like shift/ capslock/numlock in a generic way.. it becomes a sort of large state machine ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ SharpOS-Developers mailing list SharpOS-Developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sharpos-developers
