[Flexradio] HotWheel

[Sami Aintila]

For the past few weeks I've seen some people refer to the HotWheel
tool I wrote already back in 2005:
http://mail.flex-radio.biz/pipermail/flexradio_flex-radio.biz/2005-December/004153.html

First, many thanks to everyone for their kind words about HotWheel,
but I also need to say I'm sorry for leaving the program in its
unfinished and undocumented state for all this time.

HotWheel was only intended to demonstrate that the "focus problem" is
solvable. The idea was that PowerSDR could have similar functionality
built in (instead of everyone having to run a separate program).
HotWheel now has to work in a slightly hackish way, and it would be
much more reliable and elegant to have it integrated into the PowerSDR
code.

In fact, Eric asked me about how it works and I sent him some code
snippets, but it seems nothing has come out of it yet. We all know the
PowerSDR developers have had their hands full doing literally hundreds
of other improvements. Maybe if someone added HotWheel to the feature
request list on the Flex website, it would move up higher on their
ever-expanding to-do list!

Meanwhile, if anyone has HotWheel questions, comments, or improvement
ideas, I'm listening. It's not very likely I'll be making significant
changes to the current code, but you can always ask!

I'll start with this comment from Neal K3NC:

> The only negative, in fact, is that it relies on the scroll lock key being
> depressed which suspends Synergy from doing its virtual keyboard/mouse
> switching between computers.

It's configurable. You can use Notepad to edit the HotWheel.cfg file.
The file contains stuff like this:

MW ------Y            ; MouseWheel

If you change the 'Y' character into '-', the program will capture all
mouse wheel events regardless of the scroll lock status. I just
thought using scroll lock was an easy way to enable/disable HotWheel,
but obviously you need that key for other purposes. Note that you need
to stop and restart the program for the new configuration to take
effect.

73, Sami OH2BFO