unity-design team mailing list archive

[Anthony Hook <anthonyhook@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Jo-Erlend Schinstad <
joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> --
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Hi, Jo-Erlend Schinstad,

This may or may not be relevant to what you're talking about, but this
feature exists with an app for Android called RemoteDroid, and it can be
found here: http://remotedroid.net/.

The difference between what you're talking about and this particular
application is the application uses Wireless (network connection) and not
Bluetooth.  The 'client' (run on the computer, TV, etc) is a java jar, and
the application finds this application over the network.

I've tried it, it mostly works pretty okay (how generic of a description,
'eh?).

Anyway, perhaps this is something that can help the discussion.

Thanks,

-- 
- Anthony Hook