New USB mice and keyboard support for Iyonix

By Chris Williams. Published: 24th Feb 2004, 15:24:31 | Permalink | Printable

Improved HID drivers enables scroll wheel, finally

Developer X-Ample Technology has today announced the release of its new USB interface drivers for mice, keyboards and other HID class devices.

The new drivers will enable Iyonix users to, reportedly for the first time, use the scroll wheel in mice and also assign customisable actions and commands to 'special' keys and buttons on modern keyboards and mice. XAT's !HID software will also allow multiple keyboards and mice to be used.

"Finally the mouse's scroll wheel can be used in any window that supports vertical scrolling," XAT's Paul Reuvers explained. "It even works with some badly behaving programs, such as !Edit, Impression and Eureka. Different scrolling methods can be configured for different applications."

!HID is, incidentally, shareware.

Links

XAT's HID software and other USB gubbins

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Discussion

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This sounds good to me - although it's less of a reason to want SELECT ported to the Iyonix...

harmsy on 24/2/04 5:03PM
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so why is it less of a reason?

sa110 on 24/2/04 5:22PM
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because Select provides scroll wheel support also.

AndrewDuffell on 24/2/04 5:46PM
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I gather scroll wheel mice work in RISC OS 5.05 too for some applications.

mrtd on 24/2/04 5:53PM
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Scroll mouse is a select feature, so it's one less thing RO 5 is missing.

jess on 24/2/04 5:59PM
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I'd be interested to know why XAT feels that Edit and Impression are badly behaving. Eureka, although evil in the way it works (or cute, depending on how you look at it), is understandable.

Edit seems to me to work perfectly well with scrolling and exhibits no unexpected behaviour. Unless, that is, Edit under RISC OS 5 somehow doesn't work like that under other Operating System versions.

Impression (Publisher, Publisher+, Junior, tested a few moments ago; Style hasn't worked for me for some time, and I don't have the earlier Impression family applications to try) also behaves correctly with no particularly odd effects.

I don't think that WRT scrolling either Edit or Impression are bad behaved.

Gerph on 24/2/04 6:34PM
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Shame about the payment method though. Took ages to find some euros, then get the right stamp, write a letter... Good grief :-)

Excellent app though. Now all we need is Impression 32.

Eddie on 24/2/04 7:39PM
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Yep looks like a nice app! Will play some more tomorrow.

blahsnr on 24/2/04 7:58PM
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Does this implementation of the Scroll Wheel work better than that in Select?

The scroll wheel on my PS2 mouse works, but the window often scrolls in the opposite direction to the one you scroll. Even when you scroll a click at a time.

ajpullan on 24/2/04 8:25PM
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To Gerph, about badly bahaving programs...

One would expect a program to respond to a WIMP_ScrollRequest. !Edit is just an example of a program that doesn't respond as expected. Besides, the vertical scrollbar in !Edit becomes longer and shorter when you scroll.

Impression has windows nested inside windows and the scrollbar is just another window. Difficult to derermine which scrollbar belongs to which window.

Eureka has no scrollbars at all, they are all draw by the application. Besides it can display pages in split-screen mode.

Hope this explains it a bit.

To Eddie - payment method, Payment in GBP is also possible, or course :-)

To ajpullan - Scroll wheel, It scrolls a lot smoother than in Select. It knows 6 different scroll methods and you can set the preferred method for each application.

Cheers, Paul Reuvers

paulr on 24/2/04 8:37PM
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I agree that you would expect the program to respond to a scroll request. And you know what ? Edit does respond to the scroll request. It scrolls by a line when you request it to.

Impression has windows nested inside windows, yes, and they're correctly flagged as panes. This is not badly behaved, this is the correct behaviour for an application that places windows over other windows and expects them to operate as a single entity, prior to the nested Wimp. It's not at all difficult to determine which scrollbars apply to the window. Again, not badly behaved but correct behaviour for such an application.

Gerph on 24/2/04 8:56PM
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Scrolling in Select seems perfectly smooth to me. And you have a number of choices concerning the scroll-wheel in there, too. Okay, so you can't set it different for each application, but who wants to? It would just be very confusing.

JGZimmerle on 24/2/04 11:18PM
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To Gerph, You may be right about !Edit. It's been quite a while since I checked. I deliberately put 'badly' inside single quotes as I didn't want to imply 'incorrect'.

I didn't say that Impression was badly implemented. It just doesn't respond to a ScrollRequest and (from a programming point of view) it's quite a job to work out how to do it. The real pain however was Eureka.

paulr on 24/2/04 11:39PM
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When I was writing a wheel scroller (for Riscstation) I found that oregano caused the problems, it doesn't have a scroll bar for frames. Anything else I just sent a scroll request/an open_window request. Unfortunately scrolling all windows with a work area caused problems with all sorts of save boxes and things

Does the iyonix scroller scroll a page at a time if Shift is held, and beginning/end if Ctrl is held?

john on 25/2/04 1:00AM
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Well thats it!

Cured my outstanding issue with RO5.05 :-)

New graphics card and now the wheel on my mouse goes round and round :-D

Need to play a little more but !HID looks as if it will do even more spangly things with the keyboard using !altkeys...

Iyonixland just keeps on getting better :-D

epistaxsis@work on 25/2/04 9:36AM
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Is there a similar scroll-wheel util for us poor 4.02 users with ordinary ps2 mice? What does HID do, scroll-wise?

Jymbob (feeling all left out)

jymbob on 26/2/04 12:38AM
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jymbob Not sure if this would help? [link]

blahsnr on 26/2/04 11:57AM
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Superb app, one more reason to keep adding to the iyonix fund.

Didn't Impression and other CC Apps use their own Template files, and so didn't really use the standard SWI calls, so as to enhance what they could do?

This is of course AFAICR!

Jymbob, how bout getting a Castle USB card? from what I can tell, "This program requires RISC OS 5.05 (or at least USBDriver 0.26)"

Im sure that it will be in the legacy Podule cards they produced

em2ac on 26/2/04 1:49PM
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em2ac: Thing is, I already have a nice wireless mouse/keyboard using a PS2MouseMini, plus, all my podule slots are full.

blahsnr: thanks for the link, I'd forgotten about that one.

However: what do all the different scrollwheel drivers do?

When I turn my scrollwheel at the moment (currrently the y-axis is changed accordingly), is this the same as what would happen under select? or on an iyonix with HID?

Jymbob

jymbob on 8/3/04 11:29PM
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