Back in September during an interview Peter Hutterer mentioned that linuxwacom team was considered a new project — a library that would allow applications to get more information about a tablet and its features. The first version of that library was released last weekend.

There's not much information available on the library yet, so we asked Peter about it. Here is what he came up with:

The library itself is intended to be used by both the driver and client-programs that need model identification. The gnome-settings-daemon already uses it, how useful it will be for other programs, remains to be seen. The information that the library exports is largely “is this a stylus with an eraser attached”, “is this a built-in or an external tablet”, etc. So it really depends on the program how useful this information is.

The work on the library was started by Peter who wrote the basic framework. Bastien Nocera picked it from there and did the rest of the job.

So far the library looks useful mostly for GNOME's Wacom configuration tool and its KDE counterpart. The GNOME's applet, for instance, will be able to display configuration options specific for an actual device attached to your computer.

Both Krita and GIMP developers are aware of the library, but lean towards delegating the job of dealing with device specific controls to system configuration tools.

For the curious of you the source code of libwacom 0.1 is available to download.