The Intersection of Cool and Awesome

3Dconnexion (a division of Logitech) produces the coolest named device ever: The 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator . This is a 3D input device with 6 degrees of freedom, meaning you can move and rotate it through the X, Y and Z planes. I bought it originally on a whim (hey only 50 bucks!) for use with Google Sketchup and Google Earth. It took about twenty minutes to get competent with the device and I was soon whizzing around Manhattan inside Google Earth. The device is designed to use in your off hand with a mouse in your primary hand. This gives you a fantastic level of control in 3D applications.

The software that comes with the SpaceNavigator is functional, but like a lot of hardware related software is rough around the edges. You can provide customised settings for specific applications or use global settings. You can set up macros to fire when either of the SpaceNavigator’s two buttons are pressed. Understandibly the SpaceNavigator will not appear to applications as a standard input device, so 3Dconnexion provide an API to allow 3rd party developers to use the device. This opens up a host of opportunities for 3rd party developers. The Space Navigator could be used in third-party applications as a jog wheel, kind of like the Griffin Powermate and also as a 2D scroll wheel at the same time.

This leads me onto Acorn, Acorn is Gus Mueller’s newest application. It is an awesome 2D image editor, with a healthy list of features. I consider it to be a “Photoshop for the rest of us”, and has quickly become my image editor of choice. Like Gus’ VoodooPad, Acorn also supports a plug-in architecture. This allow developers to extend the applications in ways Gus wouldn’t have dreamt of (although considering Gus wrote FlyGesture I’m sure he has some pretty funky dreams). I’ve created a plug-in for Acorn that uses the SpaceNavigator API to zoom and scroll around the image you’re editing. Rotating the SpaceNavigator causes the image to rotate (using the CoreImage affine transformation filter). This just touches the surface of the cool things you can do with the SpaceNavigator and an application that supports plug-ins.

Now for the money shots, two movies of the plug-in in action:

Source code for the plug-in is on my Google public repository link, I’ve also written a Cocoa wrapper for the 3Dconnextion API (required by the Acorn plug-in): link. My Cocoa wrapper provides a much simpler interface to the device, and also provides more functionality (such as emulating a scroll wheel). I’ll be working on the wrapper more in the future.

All this code is a work in progress and you will probably need to massage the Xcode project to get it to compile. You’ll also need the 3Dconnexion API (and of course a SpaceController).

And hey look – I’m blogging again!

Update: I got daringfireballed, so I’ve moved the movies onto youtube – quality sucks, but now the server seems responsive again. Links to source code fixed.

Update: Movies now on Amazon S3. Youtube quality sucks so much. (videos still on Youtube here and here).