SGnTN Casey Fleser / Some Geek in TN

G15 showing currently playing iTunes info

Every now and again, I’ll get an email from someone that has seen this picture on flickr and they are looking for more information on how to write their own code or just curious how what’s being used to drive the keyboard, etc. In the past I’ve answered each person individually, but it probably makes more sense to write it up once here where Google, and hence everyone else, can find it.

The software being used in the picture is an experimental plugin for Proxi. It works pretty much like any other message task (Screen Message, Bubble, etc), so you can push information to it using any Proxi trigger. I decided not to include it in the main release because I didn’t think it was that good, and because I figured there were only a handful of Mac users with Logitech G15‘s. Perhaps there are more than I originally suspected?

So Proxi is one way to use the G15 with a Mac, but if that doesn’t do it it for you, maybe some code will. I pieced together an application that demonstrates how to write to the display and also how to read the 5 buttons immediately below the display. I’m using this to clear and navigate the display and they are, from left to right, clear display, home, scroll up, scroll down, and end. The demo app mirrors the whatever the tiny NSTextView is showing in the G15 display. The demo seems to work well enough, but it was cobbled together pretty quickly so if there are any problems with it just let me know. Also please let me know if this was helpful to you, maybe I’ll put more stuff like this up in the future.

Grab the code here: G15 Demo w/source