unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've been invited to hold a presentation about Ubuntu 12.04LTS to the 
Norwegian Unix User Group. So I started thinking about some cool things 
I can do to spice things up a bit. The first question that popped into 
my mind, was "how can I use my phone as a touchpad over bluetooth?" 
Because that would enable me to walk around a little more freely and not 
have to stand still in front of the laptop like a statue.

I couldn't find any existing solution for it. And that was somewhat 
surprising to me. After all, mostly all modern phones are touch devices. 
It shouldn't be that difficult to make a service and clients to enable 
the use of a smartphone as a wireless touchpad for your PC? But it would 
be very cool, and highly useful in many situations.

I bring it here, not because it's directly relevant to Unity design, but 
because it's highly relevant to the entire Ubuntu product family, as I 
see it. For Ubuntu TV, the advantages of bringing your own touch 
capability to the TV is obvious. Having a dedicated remote control app 
will be nice, but being able to use it as a touchpad will be more useful 
in general. And of course, there's no reason why such an app couldn't be 
expanded to do both.  Using the full screen as a touch keyboard would 
also be nice. Just different pages, like the dash. In the case of IVI, 
enabling the entire family to control the car stereo might yield some 
interesting results too... :)

So, I figured, since it's likely that many of those who will design 
those other products are paying attention to this list, I might as well 
bring it up here. What do you think?

--
Jo-Erlend Schinstad