Section: New Software and Platforms

Libpointing

Participants : Géry Casiez [correspondent] , Nicolas Roussel, Izzatbek Mukhanov, Sébastien Poulmane.

Libpointing is a software toolkit that provides direct access to HID pointing devices and supports the design and evaluation of pointing transfer functions [3] . The toolkit provides resolution and frequency information for the available pointing and display devices and makes it easy to choose between them at run-time through the use of URIs. It allows to bypass the system's transfer functions to receive raw asynchronous events from one or more pointing devices. It replicates as faithfully as possible the transfer functions used by Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X and Xorg (the X.Org Foundation server). Running on these three platforms, it makes it possible to compare the replicated functions to the genuine ones as well as custom ones. The toolkit is written in C++ with Python, Java and Node.js bindings available (about 49,000 lines of code in total). It is publicly available under the GPLv2 license.

The library has been thoroughly improved in 2015. Notable changes concern the management of pointing devices and displays, the standardization of URIs on all platforms, HID reports parsing on Linux and OS X, the integration of floating pixel coordinates and subpixel interaction  [34] , the improvement of existing bindings and the addition of Node.js ones, and support for Web browser integration.

Web site: http://libpointing.org/

Software characterization: [A-3] [SO-3] [SM-2] [EM-2$\uparrow$] [SDL-5]