A virtual mouse cursor, for bluetooth mouses like magic mouse.

This is an old thread, but now it is possible to use a bluetooth mouse. Swiftpoint has designed a special bluetooth mouse that will work with the iPad. Why would you want to? Well, a mouse would give you finer grain control when selecting text, and your finger will not be in the way of your vision. I think that would be totally worth while. In addition it would mimic the hand eye coordination that people are used to at a laptop/text top system. Please consider adding support for the SwiftpointGT mouse device.

This is quite interesting. Do you know if there is an SDK for iOS developer available? I've looked, but couldn't find any information.

Alexander,

Just wanted to bring up this thread again.

I am in the process of needing to do a lot more work on the iPad Pro -- textastic has been pretty good at helping me do that.  But I'm finding the lack of a mouse a bit cumbersome.

I also use Jump Desktop, and they have support for both the Swiftpoint GT as well as the Citrix X1 (which is what I've been using).  The Citrix X1 works flawlessly with Jump Desktop ... it'd be great to see support for it within Textastic.

Note, specifically for the Citrix X1 -- it's actually a BLE device (not Bluetooth Classic)... so pairing and operation is a lot easier.  Your app simply needs to incorporate CoreBluetooth as a "Central" role and connect to the X1 via BLE, and basically respond to positional events as it gets sent by the X1 (e.g. move up, move down, move left, move right, left button click, right button click).

Here's info on Jump Desktop's support of both mice: https://support.jumpdesktop.com/hc/en-us/articles/216426283-iOS-Does-Jump-Desktop-work-with-a-physical-mouse-on-iOS-

I haven't found any documentation on the X1's BLE protocol specifically... but if you use an app like LightBlue Explorer, it'd be easy enough to reverse engineer.

Let me know if you have any questions — I'd even be happy to help you with some of this if you want (I'm an iOS developer myself, with an emphasis on projects that involve device integration via things like BLE).

The Citrix X1 certainly sounds interesting and I could get it for a reasonable price at Amazon in Germany. 

What would you like to use the mouse for? Should Textastic show a cursor and synthesize touch events on mouse button presses? Do you have any particular use cases in mind? (e.g. text selection)

Yes... that's exactly what I was thinking/hoping for.

Text selection is by far the most important, but being able to synthesize all touch events on a mouse button click would also be very helpful, so that a mouse can be used to navigate throughout the app.

Also being able to perform scrolling (in the text pane as well as the file list tableview) would also be incredibly useful, too.

Thanks so much for looking into this... let me know if you have any other questions, thanks!

I've just ordered the Citrix X1 and will play around with it, but I cannot promise that I'll be able to add support for it.

(It would be great if Apple added system-wide support for mouses)