[Development] Introducing Qt Gamepad, a new qt-labs project

[Nichols Andy]

You may have noticed if you religiously watch #qt-labs or just poke around on code.qt.io page that a new project has recently been added to qt-labs.  QtGamepad is a spare-time / creative Friday project that I've been playing with on-and-off since 2012.  Some of you may have seen the first version available on my Github account, but the new version available now on qt-labs has been mostly rewritten.

http://code.qt.io/cgit/qt-labs/qtgamepad.git/

The now available version is loosely inspired by the HTML 5 Gamepad API:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2015/WD-gamepad-20150414/
but now with a much more Qt-like API.  There are both C++ and QtQuick APIs available for interacting with Gamepad devices, as well as some convience APIs for mapping gamepad buttons to keyboard buttons (to for example drive and existing interface with 5-key navigation).

Right now there is a plugin architecture for providing different backends for interacting with gamepads.  The current backends include:
XInput - Windows
evdev - Linux
SDL2 - Any platform supported by SDL2 (we just use their Gamepad module)

I'm also currently working on the native OSX/iOS backend (now that I actually have an iOS Gamepad to test) 

The Qt Gamepad module should already be useful for many of you who would like to play with Gamepad interactions in your Qt Applications, but there also is some additional work that needs to be done to improve this module so feedback and contributions are appreciated as usual ;-)

Regards and happy hacking,
Andy Nichols
@nezticle