[PD] [hid] question...

[Johannes M Zmoelnig]

hi

i am just trying to understand [hid] and have problems...

well, not real problems, just some remarks on "why are things like this 
and not different ?"
most of them are probably just my way of thinking, but i'd like to learn 
why i think so differently ...


1) what is the "timestamp"-field for ? on my system it is always a big 
number (1.10234e+09) which does not seem to change at all (probably pd's 
range is too small; should i set my hw-clock to 1970 ?)

2) how do i get the absolute position of my mouse ? i mean, it is 
relatively simple to calculate the relative movement data out of 2 
consecutive mouse-posisitions, however it is infinetely harder to get 
the absolute position out of movement data...

3) the route-labels seem to define things double: why are there messages 
like [rel rel_y 1 1.10234e+09 ( instead of [rel y 1 1.123e+09 ( ?
i think if you have a "rel" than everything afterwards will be 
"relative", so there is no need in having to prepend "rel_" to "y".
if you want destinguish between relative and absolute coordinates on a 
second level, then why is there a first layer at all ?

4) more annoying i find the behaviour with (mouse-)buttons.
is there some real reason why the identifier is like "key btn_0" ?
i would prefer something like "key 0" with "0" being a real number (why: 
because pd handles numbers better than symbols in general; you don't 
pollute the hash-tables with "btn_0" symbols (ok, not that much 
pollution); it is faster to make floats than symbols; it is very simple 
to create "btn_0" out of "0", while it is hard to get "1" out of "btn_1" 
in a generic way)

5) keyboard doesn't seem to work at all (keyboard is detected; i get 
button-presses; but i do not get which key is pressed: the label is very 
empty: '')



just my 2 cent

mfg.as.dr
IOhannes