TabletPC: Rotation and Stylus issue
#1
Here's a new report from the rotation: It still does not work. I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate 64 on a Lenovo X61 Tablet. It has manual rotation and autorotation, so the screen will swap the way you hold it. For XBMC this means you'll get a distorted or black screen when you move the laptop. But because the autorotation function is very useful in the operating system, you don't want to switch it off every thime you want to use XBMC.

Here are some photos of XBMC 11 beta 3.

0° - not rotated
90° - portrait mode 1
180° - vertically swapped
270° - portrait mode 2

The bottom of the original screen is marked. There's no taskbar because I have it on the top, like a Mac's menu bar.

The X61 tablet has various buttons on the display bezel, and the most are used in XBMC. Left is the power button (with mechanical lock), the small one acts like Ctrl-Alt-Del, next is the rotation button (swaps through the four modes), then there's the Lenovo Toolbox button, the hole is the microphone and the last button on the left side is Escape. Here's a zoom of this half. On the other pictures is the complete bar, the round thing on the right are the cursor keys, with Enter/Return in the middle. The slim sensor on the right is the fingerprint sensor. The rotation function in XBMC's picture section works, but this is done by software and not by screen orientation.

Because XBMC works if it is started in portrait or any other mode, it shouldn't be too difficult to integrate this function in XBMC. It would be enough to check for the orientation if a key is pressed or a mouse button / stylus tip is pressed. Maybe someone could code a test program which checks for rotation and saves the output to a log file. It would be interesting how this works on the auto-rotation feature.
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#2
More TabletPC-realated things, also on the x61. The tablet type is Wacom Penabled, this is identical to a Wacom serial tablet. It works at least in Windows and OS X.

- Screen Behaviour

Because the stylus already works about 8 mm over the screen, you get at any time an on-screen-display in video or music mode. That's rather annoying. An easy solution would be a changeable delay for the on-screen-display appearence.

- Movement Behaviour

XBMC's mouse pointer is really slow when using it on a tablet. The pointer is an average of 3 cm behind the stylus. I'm not sure if this is correctable.

- Pointer Behaviour

XBMC's pointer is often hidden behind the stylus or your hand when using it normally. This could be solved by an adjustable pointer/stylus range. I can't explain it very good in English, so let's try it. In the actual version, the pointer is at the same x and y position as the stylus. In coordinates this would be 0,0. If the range coordinates are 20,20, the pointer is moved 20 pixels to the top and 20 to the left. So it won't be covered by the stylus when using it. Maybe left-handed users want to move the pointer up-right, so it would be -20,20. This pointer range setting should not affect the use with a mouse, the pointer is only moved some pixels around the real X/Y-position.

- Stylus Button Behaviour

A typical Wacom stylus has four buttons, the tip, two on the side and the eraser on the back side. The tip is usually the left mouse button, the first side button is the right mouse button. The third button is not available on the X61's stylus versions. The eraser is normally not used in an operating system, only in applications. Maybe it's possible to assign special XBMC functions to it. A good thing would be a volume/mute menu.

- Pictures section

If you're once used a Wacom stylus, you never want to miss it. So it's rather annoying that XBMC's picture section doesn't support mouse or stylus input. I'm using SimpleComic on OS X, and it has a very easy method: Clicking on the right half of the window/screen is one page forward, clicking on the left half is one page back. Nothing is easier than that. The picture section also should get an on-screen display. If have music on while displaying images, you have to switch a lot of menus back until you could adjust volume or track.


A little word on this: These TabletPC issues are no one-person-problems. Lenovo has a lot of X-range tablets and the users swear on them. Other manufacturers also have real TabletPCs with Wacom Penabled Technology. Most of the can even run OS X, with full tablet support. And: All these problems will appear later, maybe in different ways, on a later Android or iPad version of XBMC. So it's not bad to get them out of all versions, including Windows, OS X and Linux.
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