Rotate screen through all four orientations?

[Guest]

[Ken Hinckley]

Hi, on my OQO 02, the keyboard rotation flips between the primary landscape and secondary landscape orientations.  I have to use the tablet PC settings to choose the seconary portrait or secondary landscape orientations (and they work), but that that is a pain and takes too long.

Is there any way to define the sequence of display orientations that the keyboard rotation function goes through?  A lot of other Tablet PC's let you do this but that option doesn't seem to be available on the OQO. Is there some registry hack to do this?

I have the code to do screen rotation sitting around somewhere... maybe I just need to add a menu into InkSeine to do it :-)

[Kenrick]

I added all four orientations to the context menu of the Automatic Screen rotator program a while back:
http://www.oqotalk.com/index.php/topic,770.msg15589.html#msg15589

If you don't want auto-rotate you can just disable it and manually switch orientations.   It also flips the mouse and touch scrollers so they work in the new orientation.

[stuartguthrie]

I added all four orientations to the context menu of the Automatic Screen rotator program a while back:
http://www.oqotalk.com/index.php/topic,770.msg15589.html#msg15589

If you don't want auto-rotate you can just disable it and manually switch orientations.   It also flips the mouse and touch scrollers so they work in the new orientation.

You're far too clever - I LOVE this program!!!

Thanks again,

Stu 

[Ken Hinckley]

I added all four orientations to the context menu of the Automatic Screen rotator program a while back:
http://www.oqotalk.com/index.php/topic,770.msg15589.html#msg15589

If you don't want auto-rotate you can just disable it and manually switch orientations.   It also flips the mouse and touch scrollers so they work in the new orientation.

Thanks Kenrick. I downloaded your app and it works great. I like how you allow some customization of the tilt angle and delay before switching.

This is a program near and dear to my heart since I hacked something similar back in about 1999 using custom hardware that I cobbled together for my old Cassiopeia E105 Pocket PC. It's amazing to see that kind of stuff actually integrated and useful in current devices!

I had a version of my hardware/software for the Tablet PC at one point. One thing I played with there was a "THIS SIDE UP" arrow that would interactively display and rotate before the actual screen rotation happened, but was about to happen. This was nice as a little advanced warning that it was about to flip, and you could even stop tilting your device to avert the switch. I'll have do do up a blog post on how that worked at some point. If you were interested to try and hack that into your application, I could dig up the bitmaps I used for it. In my old code the "THIS SIDE UP" preview arrow icons were drawn with color-key transparency in a layered window.

A suggestion I have for another feature is to kill the screen saver if the user picks up the device, and brings it to an angle suggesting that they are looking at the screen. On my old device this would actually power it on, and it just felt wonderful.

[stuartguthrie]

One thing I played with there was a "THIS SIDE UP" arrow that would interactively display and rotate before the actual screen rotation happened, but was about to happen. This was nice as a little advanced warning that it was about to flip, and you could even stop tilting your device to avert the switch.

A suggestion I have for another feature is to kill the screen saver if the user picks up the device, and brings it to an angle suggesting that they are looking at the screen. On my old device this would actually power it on, and it just felt wonderful.

They're great ideas!

Stu

[Kenrick]

Thanks, those are great ideas!  If you can dig up the arrows I'll see if I can put em in the app.  I'd love to be able to turn the thing on when it's picked up but of course it would have to be running to know it's being picked up...  screen saver is definitely doable though

I'd really like to find a way to access the accelerometer without polling through WMI but I guess that will require some significant architectural changes.

[Ken Hinckley]

Thanks, those are great ideas!  If you can dig up the arrows I'll see if I can put em in the app.  I'd love to be able to turn the thing on when it's picked up but of course it would have to be running to know it's being picked up...  screen saver is definitely doable though

I'd really like to find a way to access the accelerometer without polling through WMI but I guess that will require some significant architectural changes.

I still need to dig up those arrows. I think they are buried in an old source tree, I don't have them on my tablet right now, so I need to look more.

Another suggestion I have is to add a little hysteresis between the screen orientations. That is, the device should tend to stick to the current orientation. Once a device switches to an orientation, don't switch to the adjacent ones at +/- 45 degrees, but rather +/- (45+N) degrees where N is the hysteresis angle (probably 10-15 degrees, ideally user tunable). Or maybe you do something like this already and I just need to tune the settings a little more...

Great utility. I use it all the time now.

[Kenrick]

Another suggestion I have is to add a little hysteresis between the screen orientations. ...

Another good idea, it's nice to have a GUI expert on the forum

[Ken Hinckley]

Another suggestion I have is to add a little hysteresis between the screen orientations. ...

Another good idea, it's nice to have a GUI expert on the forum

Thanks :-)

This paper explains exactly how it worked in my old demo. See page 6.
http://research.microsoft.com/users/kenh/papers/ppc-sensing_color.pdf

There were a couple of other refinements that I came up with later on, but I don't think those will work with the low sampling rate we're currently able to obtain through the accelerometer DLL...

[Ken Hinckley]

Another suggestion I have is to add a little hysteresis between the screen orientations. ...

Another good idea, it's nice to have a GUI expert on the forum

Kenrick, I wrote up a blog post on how some of the auto-rotation tweaks worked in my old demo for the Tablet PC (and Pocket PC). I've included the preview feedback arrow graphic that I used (see the linked one, with a black background for setting the color-key transparency, or adapt the images in the post as you see fit...). My software rotated the bitmap internally, so there was only one version of the bitmap.

http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/alpineinker/archive/2008/05/08/some-thoughts-on-automatic-screen-rotation.aspx

I hope you find it interesting, even if the tweaks don't prove to be helpful on the OQO. It's hard to say because I was working with a much higher sampling rate. (Generally it was somewhere between 40 Hz up to a maximum of around 400 Hz depending on the version of my hardware and firmware, and how many sensors I set it up to report back on...)

Feel free to ping me if you have any questions.

[Kenrick]

Thanks!  Certainly the hysteresis and the directional arrows can be done and would make the auto-rotate app more usable.   I plan to work on it when I have some free time.

I should mention that Terran helped write the auto-rotate app too, in fact he came up with the initial UI and rotate algorithm.  He's disappeared over the last 8 months or so though, I know he was having problems with his OQO so maybe he doesn't use one anymore.  Still a nice example of an open source project with multiple programmers that turned out something useful!