[WildBill]

I'm still working hard on SmoothText 1.0.5, but in the meantime I got a new laptop. It came with XP Pro, but since I still do a lot of developing specifically for Windows 2000, I bought an extra hard drive and put 2k on it. One thing I ran into was that the best driver I could load for the Synaptics touchpad can't automatically disable it if a USB mouse is detected. The Dell laptop I use for work can do this, and I find it to be really indispensable. Long story short, I spent a day and a half and wrote a little app that can do the job. It lives in the system tray, and like SmoothText you can right click on it to configure it. Right now there are only two options, whether or not to disable the touchpad and/or joystick if either are detected.

The link for it is here:

http://www.mediafire...uxl3jhr6de8le4i

You have to have a Synaptics device for this to work, as it uses the Synaptics API to control the device. It's open-source, as usual, with no licenses on the stuff I wrote (I'm old-school when it comes to that sort of thing...I'm a public-domain guy at heart).

Anyhow, I hope that someone finds it useful. It certainly is for me.


Version 1.0.0
----------------------
Initial release


Version 1.0.1
----------------------
1. Improved USB pointing device detection.
2. Added Devices...button that will show a pop-up displaying all detected pointing devices and USB devices. The display automatically refreshes itself.


Version 1.0.2
----------------------
1. Improved USB pointing device detection.
2. Improved detection of hot-plugging and disconnection of USB devices. Doing so will automatically cause the list on the devices window to refresh.
3. Added a status bar to the devices window that shows whether the Synaptics joystick and/or touchpad are enabled or disabled.
4. Added an "Ok" button to the devices window that will close it.
5. Added a checkbox to the devices window that will cause it to display the hardware ID of all devices in addition to the name of each device. This can be useful for troubleshooting troublesome devices, for example displaying the USB vid (vendor ID) and pid (product ID). Every USB device vendor has a unique vid, and each vendor has a list of product ID's that uniquely identify each device they manufacture. Those lists are typically available on the Internet.

This post has been edited by WildBill: 23 October 2012 - 05:43 AM

[WildBill]

MediaFire killed the file, so I posted it again and fixed the link.

[WildBill]

Uploaded version 1.0.1, which has improved USB device detection and a button that shows what devices have been detected.

[WildBill]

I switched to a new mouse on my laptop and had to make a bunch of improvements to this tool. This should be useful for anyone who has a Synaptics driver for their laptop and would like it to automatically disable the touchpad and joystick when a mouse is plugged in (and re-enable them when the mouse is unplugged).

With all the changes I was tempted to bump the version to 1.1, but left it at 1.0.2. Still, it's been improved quite a lot since the last version, and for me it's one of those little utilities I can't live without.