Highrez

Hi Phil,

This might be out of scope for XMBC, and it's a lot of work, but I'm throwing it out there anyway since I think it's a cool idea.

I saw a picture of a Asus ZenBook which had a numpad printed on the trackpad, which I assume is there for some special key binding functionality of that trackpad. It got me thinking, this should be possible to implement for any trackpad.

So imagine if you could define areas, or a grid, on your trackpad, where each area is bindable to a function or a key. For example, Let us define the upper right corner as a "button" and bind it to "Media - Next Track". Now, press-hold the Fn-key and tap the upper right corner of the touchpad to change track. Another example, lets define the top half as a slider, Fn-key + drag right to increase the volume. The possibilities are endless when we add layers to this.

I am stoked, what are your thoughts?



Reminder: Open source ftw!

Firstly, my mum has that laptop and that trackpad/numeric pad is a real pain in the backside. Its there because there is no numpad on the keyboard but it rarely works properly and when its in number pad mode, the mouse does not work!

As to try8ing to emulate that in XMBC, its not possible. Because all XMBC can intercept is the "click" or pointer movement, and the only pointer position information it has, is the position of the cursor on the screen, not the x/y of where you pressed the trackpad - therefore, not possible. And of course it cant distinguish between a mouse or a trackpad.

The only place you could do this (AFAIK) would be inside the trackpad driver itself.

So I'm afraid, its not going to happen.

Paid developers don't get enough time to do things right, so of course it's not working

I still haven't figured out how everything is tied together between the input device, kernel, drivers, application etc, so I'm kind of clueless of what is possible, with reasonable amount of effort.

And unpaid ones have even less time (especially when they are paid to do other development)

Hehe yes that's true. What I meant though was that our side projects don't have deadlines, we have a lifetime perfecting them.