Multitouch followup: gesture recognition?

[Simon Thum]

Am 31.03.2010 11:45, schrieb Florian Echtler:
>>>> This seems essential to your approach, so the feasibility of a server
>>>> extension (oranything else, but a extension incurs overhead) depends a
>>>> fair bit on the dynamics of your gesture customization.
>>> Just specifying what gestures a specific window would be interested in
>>> wouldn't usually be "live", would it? That's something defined at
>>> creation time and maybe changed occasionally over the lifetime, but not
>>> constantly.
>> Which is why a declarative approach is OK for that. It's the dynamics
>> that make it harder. More specificially, the dynamic part of your
>> formalism likely needs tailored requests.
> The reason for this being that the special client won't be notified of
> property changes on other client windows, correct?
Not quite, the sgc could probably register for prop changes. By
'dynamics' I was referring to cancelling a gesture or other gesture
state feedback a client may want to send. Props aren't good for that,
but requests are.

In requests, you're free to define semantics, whereas props are limited
and quite racy.

> 
>> If you want to try a special client, it's therefore sensible to divide
>> your requests and events into route-through (client -> special gesture
>> client or sgc -> client) and server-processed (server->sgc or sgc->
>> server), if possible.
> As far as I understand the architecture, everything except the plain
> input events would be just routed through the server between the two
> clients. In fact, I guess that after defining some custom events in
Yes, part of the idea is that the server provides only the
infrastructure. Routing, simple state tracking, somesuch.

> inputproto, it should be possible to send them through
> XSend{Extension}Event?
At first glance it looks suitable, but I'm not convinced it is
appropriate. You'll want the server to select which clients get events,
as is done with Xi event masks. This way, the gesture client doesn't
need to know about all the windows out there.

Also, I recall Xi2 and Xi1 (XSendExtensionEvent) shouldn't be mixed.

> One other question, though: how would the special client go about
> receiving copies of the input events destined for the regular clients?
> AFAICT a pointer grab is quite the wrong way; I've already used
> something along the lines of
> 
> // select motion events for entire screen
> XIEventMask mask;
> mask.deviceid = XIAllDevices;
> mask.mask_len = XIMaskLen( XI_LASTEVENT );
> mask.mask = (unsigned char*)calloc( mask.mask_len, sizeof(char) );
> 
> XISetMask( mask.mask, XI_Motion );
> XISetMask( mask.mask, XI_ButtonPress );
> XISetMask( mask.mask, XI_ButtonRelease );
> 
> XISelectEvents( display, DefaultRootWindow(display), &mask, 1 );
> free( mask.mask );
> 
> to capture all XInput events, however, I believe that's also quite
> flawed. What other options exist?
To me it seems sane.

This replication of all input is one of the reasons for the 'special' in
'special gesture client'. Whatever it shall be it should probably be a
part of Xi2. What leads you to think the above is flawed ?

Cheers,

Simon