Re: [iPAQ] Browsers and Mail Clients

Pardon the cross-post, I'm shifting this discussion from iPAQ to
handhelds. All replies should be directed to handhelds.

Jim Gettys writes:
> > Another question that I was pondering is how to deal with xscribble --
> > it would be nice if one of the buttons could be a scribble toggle, and
> > then you could scribble anywhere on the screen instead of just in the
> > xscribble window. This would save a lot of screen real estate, and make
> > the machine more useful overall.
>
> Actually, you can do better yet... You can write a program that goes looking
> for windows that want input events, and "do the right thing": for large
> windows, allow scribbling anywhere, for small dialog boxes, pop up a window
> to scribble in. This can be done the same way that Bob Scheifler did speech
> recognition control of X (the atox program).
> - Jim

Jim,

I'm really intrigued by this idea. I've been thinking for a long while
about how it would be best to get "gestured" character events to
programs and the Right Thing would be to simply gesture on top of the
window of interest and it would get the character event. The difficult
problem is that some programs will be expecting both mouse events and
keyboard events and there is an ambiguity since the stylus is being
used to input both. In my mind I had decided that a reasonable
compromise would be to force the user to specify whether the stylus
event would be a character-stroke or a mouse event. This could be
through an on-screen or hardware button, (the implementation could be
a full-screen, transparent stroke recognizer that would be toggled in
out of minimization via the button).

At least, that's as far as I had gotten with my thinking until I saw a
couple of posts from you regarding Bob Scheifler's, "Hand Off X!"
work. Does that work really handle a single window that can accept
both keyboard and mouse events? (Think dialog with "filename" text
area and "Load" button). If so, how? And do you have a good reference
that discusses how this was done? Or at least the definitive source
archive for atox?

Thanks,

-Carl
Received on Wed Sep 20 2000 - 13:37:00 EDT