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 2016. Notable changes concern the migration of code on GitHub, the set up of continuous integration and the automated release of buildings for Windows, Linux and MacOS. libpointing can be easily installed using apt-get command on Linux and and Homebrew and Macport package installers on MacOS. New features like the estimation of the input frequency have been added and different demos have been developed. Code has been re-factored and various bugs fixed.

Web site: http://libpointing.org/

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