I am trying to develop an application which responds to multiple digital pens (IRIS Pens) so that if any of the pen writes on paper; I relay the output to a single screen. Thus making a multi-input whiteboard for myself.
In Ubuntu these pens are recognized as mouse and thus can be handled in a similar manner as mouse events are handled.
So now what I plan to do is to handle these events in C/C++ using XLib and pass these events to a Java Swing application using JNI callback. I am able to do this but when the X11 window looses focus no events are transferred to the Swing frame. I also tried to use the root window in X11 but it does not seem to work.
Any help would be really appreciated. Thanking you in advance.
How about maximizing the C/X11 window in front of the Java one, and making it transparent? You should be able to see the Java window while still focusing on the C/X11 one.
Since you are using Ubuntu, you can achieve this using the "Opacity, brightness and saturation" plugin for Compiz. It is in the compiz-plugins-main package, and you can activate it with Compiz Settings Manager (from the compizconfig-settings-manager package). When you activate the plugin, alt+wheel is bound by default to change the transparency of the focused window.
Try reading the mouse directly. I don't remember the exact location, but you should find it in something like '/dev/input/mouseX', where X is the number of your device, ranging from 0 to n-1 devices..
When you read the packet, your application should block until the mouse moves and then your read function will return a raw mouse packet which describes the delta (which is probably more useful then the screen coordinates, in your case) and the mouse button statuses.
The raw packet can be decoded as described here: http://www.computer-engineering.org/ps2mouse/
Create a modal dialog and set it to XmDIALOG_SYSTEM_MODAL (the actual name of the property depends on your toolkit: Motif, Gtk, Qt, ...). Dialogs like this block the whole display and can never loose focus.
The drawback is of course that you can't do anything else while this dialog is on the screen.
This entry in the X11 FAQ might help.
Related
I am attempting to create a a java GUI for use on Zedboard with the 7" touchscreen display. The GUI I am creating is supposed to mimic exactly (though scaled down) a physical console with many interactive buttons.
My question is what would be the best method in making the buttons interactive, my first thought was to cut out the buttons of the console and have each one a separate image that can be set as interactive, but I feel there may be another simpler method.
Thanks
LDY
For the console mimicking, you could take an image of the entire console and then listen to touch event at specific points in the image which corresponds to a button. Based on where the touch event occurs, you could do different actions.
For this you need to get the coordinates of the touch event and check if it corresponds to any of the buttons on the console.
I want to emulate wacom tablet in such way, that different apps like photoshop will resive my mouse events with pressure. How can I do it?
Java API is oriented to normal mouse events. Using a mouse device does not give you a sense of pressure, as the device does not provide such input. If a normal mouse is your input device, then you have no way to get such info.
You could however imitate such input functionality, using the time interval of the mouse button being clicked. I would suggest using the "key down" and the "key up" event of the mouse click and translate the time difference between them as an indicator of the "pressure". Perhaps this tutorial could give you some guidance.
Another idea would be to get somehow info from the device directly. You could use the device API to get direct input and wrap it in your application.
Hope I helped!
Wow, what a stupid question you might say. But is it possible? I have a mouse move event in a Jpanel and it works even when the application is not in focus, now can I have something like that for the clicking event or something similar. And most importantly I don't want other apps (even something like the main menu) to lose focus when i click on my app.
I thought of the system's event queue but i'm not sure where that would lead me to.
Thanks in advance.
[EDIT - the purpose]
I want to create an app that mimics the users interactions with the system in a later time. for example a user takes the mouse and clicks and writes and my app will mimic that in say 2 hours time. ofcourse i would need a system hook for the outer events but i wanted to avoid os-dependant code so i basically capture the screen, take it to my app,for example the user clicks on an icon in the captured picture and then for making that come to life, i translate the coordinates to the real icon and click it (with a Robot) and in this way i can capture the user's events in my own app. the problem occurs when the user clicks on the main menu or right clicks (he's doing that in my app, and my app does that to the system so my app is in between) and ofcourse the real main menu will lose focus when the user tries to click on one of it's items.
sorry for my english.
I'm still not sure I follow what you are trying to do. But the concept of an app getting focus when you click on it is fundamental to the GUI and I suspect rather difficult to get around.
I just found this:
Focusable Windows
To support palette windows and input methods, client code can prevent a Window from becoming the focused Window. By transitivity, this prevents the Window or any of its descendants from becoming the focus owner. Non-focusable Windows may still own Windows that are focusable. By default, every Frame and Dialog is focusable. Every Window which is not a Frame or Dialog, but whose nearest owning Frame or Dialog is showing on the screen, and which has at least one Component in its focus traversal cycle, is also focusable by default. To make a Window non-focusable, use Window.setFocusableWindowState(false).
In this doucment http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/awt/doc-files/FocusSpec.html
That sounds like it might do what you want.
Using Java is there anyway to display a custom form/image that behaves similar to TrayIcon.displayMessage() function in that it displays just above the system tray for a while then disappears?
I am also looking for a way to display multiple notifications at the same time by having them display above each other.
If not, how do I find the pixel location for the lower left corner just above the system tray?
I don't think there's a shortcut for drawing frames that act just like the standard TrayIcons (with the x button in the corner) that support stacking akin to the Mac Growl notifications.
you will probably have to implement it yourself.
I've found that stacking messages like that is a complete waste of time as the user will not pay attention to them - the better location for these is in the status area of the application in a simple popup menu.
You can use java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment. getLocalGraphicsEnvironment() to get information about the desktop, which contains 'getMaximumWindowBounds()' which takes care of things like the taskbar position.
You can use a subclass of a javax.swing.JWindow to create a window without a border which can be positioned on the desktop relative to the bottom right corner. This will not always work as the default tray icon, as the location of the icon generator can be somewhere else other than that.
You can add a button that acts like the 'x' button of a standard desktop window - but it's going to be platform dependent.
I use square windows that stack up from the top right corner if I'm using LTR, and it seems to work well.
Go check out Java GNOME. It has Java bindings for GTK, including a status icon for the tray, and notification events.
I'm trying to internationalise a Java applet and with that, support scripts which are written from right to left. I want to set up component orientations for all java components added to the view automatically.
My solution so far has to listen to all AWTEvent's using the windows mask:
c.getToolkit().addAWTEventListener(listener, AWTEvent.WINDOW_EVENT_MASK);
...and then setting the c/o on each window added, as well as adding component listeners to set c/o on any components added to the window at a later point.
My issue is that JInternalFrames are not handled by this solution, I want to be able to add another listener for these events, much like I have done for windows. Any ideas?
Or alternatively, are there any better approaches to handling script direction for all components in an applet?
Add a ContainerListener to the JDesktopPane. As a component is added to the desktop you can change its orientation.
Do you have a handle on all those JInternalFrames? If so, try the internal frame listener.
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/javax/swing/event/InternalFrameListener.html
It notes that it's the analogue to the AWT WindowListener.
AWTEventListener on the current Toolkit will only give you events coming from the toolkit. Generally events generated by lightweight components will have been caused by mouse or key events.
Asking for all of something in a process is usually a very bad sign. A low-level piece of code is making policy for the whole program. A much better approach is to add listeners near to where you create the component, before it is "realised". This is repeated code, but then you probably already have repeated code. So factor out into a method. Then you have only one place to update, unless you have any cases where it doesn't apply which would have broken the global approach.