[chuck-users] odd hid issue (touchpad)

[Kassen]

Hans;


>  In recent years the quality of high performance mice has gone up quite a
>> bit, probably originally inspired by games like Quake. It was chiefly mouse
>> signals that I was refering to.
>>
>
> I haven't checked that out.
>

It can become relevant when using a mouse as a general purpose sensor, for
example to  scan a turntable platter's rotation. In that case more
resolution and a higher poll rate will lead to a more expressive instrument.


>
>  Sadly (I feel) the quality of keyboards hasn't made the same progression
>> and keyboard ghosting is now typically worse then it was on keyboards from
>> the 80's.
>>
>
> On the Mac side, this was a problem in the 1990s - they would wear out
> after awhile - but not lately.
>

Sorry, but I haven't yet seen a keyboard that I liked as much as the old IBM
Model M's. This is -of course- largely a matter of personal taste and
application.


> Windows is notorious for letting users install drivers on their own.


I have to say that I don't see any harm in that. We can't expect a OS maker
to know ahead of time what sort of exotic devices and cards we'd like to add
to our computer. I do agree that standard devices are a big leap up, with
most things I can throw out the manual and discs and simply plug it in,
expecting it to work. Good thing too as I don't like manuals and discs that
much. If your mouse or webcam needs a manual it could probably do with a
severe redesign, I feel.


also, the Mac short keyboards have a special "function" key, that lets one
> to supply some of the keys of an extended keyboard, plus some for special
> Mac use. The function key was not reported at all, and pressing it did not
> report the extended keyboard key values. So it has some USB function not
> covered by the HID standard, it seems.
>

Yes, I think those are a exception. I have a "fn" key on this laptop's
keyboard as well, it deals with things like screen brightness,
sleep/suspend, locking and so on. The strange thing is that ChucK doesn't
register it as a HID key. We might initially suspect that it would talk to
the hardware directly for things like screen brightness but the OS (Linux in
this case) is clearly aware of it as it -for example- shows a little meter
to indicate the change in brightness. Maybe it's the actual function
(brightness, locking, etc) that is linked to a "keypress" and the OS might
be unaware of there not being a single dedicated key for those. Especially
with the way some laptops deal with NumLock that approach might lead to
greater compatibility, I'm not sure, but that could still be according to
the standard.

Yours,
Kas.
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