Thursday, March 13, 2008

New Tablet Config

I've got the initial cut of the new replacement for GTK+'s extended devices input config done.
The old dialog has been around for quite some time, and is really good for a low-level view of things. However, the needs of users have moved more and more into the high-level artist-centric viewpoint. This is a bit nice for me as a software engineer, but definitely is not as nice for my artist side. X? 1? 6? Which do I need? What do they mean? Also "pad"? Why is part of my tablet showing up just like my tip of my pen does? And for that matter, why does my eraser show up as something separate from the front of the same pen?
The work on a replacement has progressed to a point where something is visible and initially functional. One minor point is that the dialog is now dockable... but that's a minor item. The first functional point of note is a separation of hardware from configuration. The more common case will be that a user has a single tablet, but a few different ways of working with it. The next point is the Test Area. I've found that it is a bit hard to tell what's going on with tablet config. Currently the area should switch to indicate the device currently active on the tablet. Additionally it will dump events to stdout. This will allow for checking things like button numbers, axis values, etc.
This is in the current sources now, but needs USE_NEW_INPUT_DEVICES defined in verbs.cpp to turn it on (hint: this is for those of you able to build). So the next thing is to get some user feedback to see if it reports events correctly, detects actual devices, etc. So have at it and have fun. :-)

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