Binding a trackball to NPAPI

Question

I want to use a second pointing device (the trackball) as a control for a specific function on a program. This means I would NOT want any mouse functionality from the trackball, I just want to get the movement data and somehow use the NPAPI to get that into our web app. Is there a way to bind a mouse/trackball to a specific program that it doesn't act as a mouse/trackball for the computer?

Thanks in advance!

UPDATED: actually ask a question

Answer 1

To the best of my knowledge and my understanding of how HID devices work, there is no way to do what you want to do. If you could do it at all, you could probably do it from an NPAPI plugin, but there is no way to tell the operating system not to take control of one specific pointing device as opposed to any others.

Now, if you had a special HID trackball that didn't show up as being a regular pointing device then you could possibly do it with that, but I have never heard of any way to take control of just one of potentially many HID pointing devices on windows, linux, or mac.

There may be a way to hack something together in Linux by changing the way the drivers work, etc, but I don't know of any.