Smoother Panning in GNOME Shell Magnifier

[Robert cole <rkcole72984 gmail com>]

Hello, everyone.

Well, I did a slight bit of tinkering with the GNOME Shell Magnifier 
settings today (I love that I can tinker in Linux!).

I am not trying to complain by any means, so I hope that this does not 
sound as such. I have been trying out Unity2D in Ubuntu 11.10, which I 
recently installed onto my desktop system to replace Linux Mint 12. I 
love how the GNOME Shell Magnifier is coming along, but at the present 
time it does not pan as smoothly as I am used to, which makes it 
slightly more difficult to read and to navigate my system. The same can 
be said for panning using Compiz's eZoom plugin on a fresh install of 
Ubuntu--it does not pan so smoothly either.

Well...I learned through experience that I could change the value for 
Compiz's Mouse position polling plugin to smoothen things out. (Just for 
the record, the GNOME Shell Magnifier pans much more smoothly by default 
as compared to Compiz's default settings under Unity.) Anyway, I learned 
that if I decrease the Mouse Poll Interval from 40 to 1 panning was very 
smooth...well...just beautiful to me.

So today, rather than bother the list by asking where I could find the 
settings files for the Zoom feature, I figured I'd do some exploration. 
I ran the basic command:

locate magnifier

and this file stood out to me:
/usr/share/gnome-shell/js/ui/magnifier.js

I am not a professional programmer, but I figured I'd take a look at 
this file. I fired up nano (after making a backup of the file to my 
/home directory) and began reading. I found the following line under the 
first set of functions at the top of the file (section comment below):

// Keep enums in sync with GSettings schemas
[...]
const MOUSE_POLL_FREQUENCY = 50;

So I contemplated whether I should change this value from 50 to 1. I 
gave in and did it!

I made the changes from within Unity2D, so I logged out and then logged 
into GNOME Shell. I crossed my fingers and then hit CTRL+ALT+M, the 
keyboard shortcut I set to activate the magnifier...and...VOILA! Super 
smooth panning! This made me love GNOME Shell even more than I already do!

My questions as concerning this thread, though, is this: How likely is 
it that decreasing this value from 50 to 1 will cause possible 
instabilities? Is it set to 50 for any given reason (I am sure there has 
to be a reason)? I ask this because it is the same way with Compiz, but 
it seems (in either case) that the lower the Poll Interval (Compiz) or 
Poll Frequency (GNOME shell Magnifier) the more smoothly panning is in 
fullscreen magnification mode.

In any case, I just wanted to put this on the list to get some input. As 
I mentioned earlier, I am definitely not a professional programmer. I 
took classes in C++, Visual Basic, and Python throughout the years, but 
I the class content was quite basic.

thanks for any input regarding this subject. I'm really looking forward 
to GNOME 3.4!

Take care.