As everyone's mentioned mouse support is, well, a rather nasty hack job at best (no offence to anyone of course the code that we have and the fact that it does anything at all is quite brilliant!) so there are some fundamental flaws that just can't be taken on without rebuilding things from much lower down. The problem with the task menu, for example, is that the mouse doesn't send pressure information to X, and the application menu for some reason is tied into that pressure information (I guess the idea at some point was to have a different menu show up if you used your finger instead of the stylus or something...); unfortunately there's no way to simulate this with a regular mouse. And I mean, I went as far as actually trying to build my own version of XTest that would feed default pressure information to the X server, which theoretically would have solved the problem... but it just got waaay to far over my head since Im not a veteran X maintainer or anything ;-)

There are numerous other problems that are caused by similarly unusual situations on the tablet. For example, the way that the current mouse support works means that when you click a button on the mouse it actually sends two almost simultaneous click commands on the X server; why two? who knows, but one didn't work and two seems to! But when you get into games and things that don't have Hildon's weird mouse features you suddenly end up with double clicks everywhere... etc etc etc.

The bottom line is that at the end of the day I relate mouse support to things like screen rotate or USB host mode: the community has proven that A) it's possible and B) people want it... now it's up to Nokia/the Maemo development community to listen to this and work to bring it into the next version of the OS (or at least make it easier to implement properly next time!).

Thanks,
-Rob