[KPhotoAlbum] Patch for initial support for 6 degrees of freedom devices.

[Ben Martin]

On Sun, 2008-04-27 at 14:59 +0300, Tuomas Suutari wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> thanks for the patch! Nice to see new people exploring KPA code and 
> extending it.

I have also been playing with some of the plugins and adding some
libferris functionality to them. But nothing clean enough for patches
yet :(

> 
> About 6dof devices: IMHO KPA is not quite right place to implement 
> support for such devices. Maybe better place would be on some lower 
> application layer, like kdelibs, Qt or maybe even X11, so more 
> applications could make use of that device when available.
> 
> What do you think?

I've been thinking about lower level integration too. 

I make the libsixdof emit relative axis movement events every nth of a
second. I think that maybe having a signal in Qt widget that does that
might be the lowest level. But that doesn't really gain you much
relative to just using libsixfdof itself and attaching to its
boost::signal.

One use case I have found for Qt integration is so that you can popup a
context menu and Qt itself will allow the 6dof device to navigate and
click a menu item. This sort of thing works well for generic things like
popup menus. If you have a canvas and want to zoom, pan, move images/sec
forward or backward in the slideshow then it becomes harder to just fold
libsixdof completely into Qt/KDE. The user will always be interested in
binding axis movement to functions. In the case of panning the pan
function itself should take a double and interpret that as a force
metric as to how much the user is moving the 6dof device and pan the
image relative to that force. Another complex example is if I want to
turn the dial to jump by month in KPA thumbnail view. Apart from having
KPA itself somewhat aware of 6dof (at least by exposing a relative
movement function for calling) trying to implement this control becomes
difficult.


> 
> I know that's not up to you entirely, but do you think you have any 
> chances getting your work to some lower level library?

In any case, I would love to see used at lower levels for popup menus
and simple interaction. When I have the time to try to push a patch into
Qt I might have a crack at it.

I just started out targeting things that I use and get most gain from
patching right off the bat ;)

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