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Old 01-01-2012, 05:54 AM   #1
537h
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Posts: 11
Karma: 548
Join Date: Dec 2011
Device: Sony prs-t1
Page Turn Buttons on Rooted PRS-T1

I'm rather interested in what use we make of the T1's hardware page turn buttons. Within the confines of the Sony interface, the buttons serve to not only turn pages, but also skip tracks in the audio player and "page-down" in the stock web browser. I'd be nice to give those keys added live in the rooted world. So here are my thoughts and discoveries as I've been trying to learn a bit about this issue.

The page turn arrows are, to the Android system, buttons 105 and 106 and are mapped as DPAD_LEFT and DPAD_RIGHT. The Sony apps are written in such a way that these "keyboard" commands have meaning. Most other apps don't give them a roll or at least a useful one, though someone has been kind enough to tweak FBReader to use them (see the Rooting and Modding Wiki).

One thought I had was to remap the buttons as volume up and down buttons, since many Android apps use these controls for scrolling and turning pages (for example the Kindle, InstaFetch, and Google Reader apps on my reader).

Another idea is to remap the buttons as "spacebar" and "shift + spacebar", which Android itself recognizes as page down/up on web pages and unpaginated documents (so other apps would work like the stock T1 browser). This might be the more beneficial use for me since I don't mind horizontal swiping to turn pages but definitely dislike vertical animated scrolling on Eink.

Obviously, for many of us, it would be nice to retain the function of the buttons in Sony's reading app as well as gain use in other apps. I really don't know how easy or possible it would be for the buttons to fire simultaneous commands or commands based on the app being used.

I played around with an app called ButtonRemapper that was developed a year or so ago but never left beta. I managed to change the keymap with it but didn't really get to see any results, which might have been related to the fact that it locked up and I had to hard reset and then factory reset after that. Perhaps manually changing things in the keylog file is the way to go, but I'll have to do some more research before I dive back in (burn me once...).

Here is some reading on keymaps.

And the XDA thread for ButtonRemapper.

If anyone else has any resources or experience to share or want to try their hand at a button-hacking solutions, please do.
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