Additions to key-mon

I've been busy and did lots of updates to key-mon, my keyboard status monitor.

The big news is that it's now resizable!

Normal size:
Normal screenshot

Small size:
Smaller

Larger size:
Larger

It can be scaled to any size not just three, here it is at 2x without the mouse and showing the meta (Windows) key:
Huge

Heathenx is helping me get nicer looking images, especially at smaller sizes. For the really small sizes I needed to change the look a bit,  so now I have two sets of SVG files, one for the normal size and another for the smaller size.

Creating the different sizes was a bit of a pain. GTK wants to read the svg from disk so any changes made to svg needs to be dumped to a temporary file.  Also GTK doesn't seem to have a parameter to load and resize, so I end up manipulating the svg so that it is scaled larger or smaller.

The extra work was worth it, I think.  Some screencasts today are high resolution, so the key status monitor will be tiny.  Other screen casts are very small, so the key status monitor takes up a lot of space. Now application is infinitely flexible and can serve anyone's needs.

Last night I thought of another application.  Showing the full keyboard and showing what you are pressing as you press them.  A million years ago I wrote an application for school (written in Turbo Pascal 4.0) to help the students learn the keys to Word Perfect 5.x and MS Word 3.x. I could reuse some of the code from key-mon to do something similar, maybe for a typing tutor of some sort.

Comments

Vadim Peretokin said…
Great stuff.
Unknown said…
Hey,

Nice that someone has finally taken my app and is going to keep working on it! Not sure how to get a hold of you but I've cloned your repo and implemented dynamic device plugging/unplugging support, theme support, and some small fixes:

http://code.google.com/r/danielgtaylor-keymon/source/list

Here is a quick theme I whipped up based on the Apple keyboard/mouse:

http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/8664/screenshot.png

Hopefully you can review and merge those changes to the main branch.

Take care,
Daniel
Scott Kirkwood said…
Great stuff. maybe you can figure out how to get wacom tablets working...
You could just contribute to key-mon as well if you liek.
Unknown said…
Not sure about Wacom tablets; mine is currently in storage with no easy way to get at it, but if I can get my hands on it or another sample I'll give it a try.

If you could give my Google Code user commit access to the main project it would be appreciated and I'll merge my branch.

Thanks,
Daniel
Anonymous said…
Hi Scott,

I love this app and use it on my Linux system. But when will you , if ever, create a version of Key-Mon for Windows? I'm sure someone with your enormous talent could do so within a few hours. Ok, you see I am aiming at your ego here but it is worth a try, eh! ;-)

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