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Opera Adds Gesture Navigation
Trepidity writes "The Opera web browser appears to be the first to add gesture-based navigation (made popular recently in the game Black&White) as a standard feature. You can perform a bunch of common actions with simple gestures, such as holding down the right mouse button moving left and releasing to go back, or moving up then down while holding the button to reload the current page. A list of the various implemented commands can be found on their site." I've been playing a fair amount of B&W lately - the interface took a bit to learn, but once you['ve got it done, it's actually a very efficent system of getting around - the use within the Web might finally take the Web beyond just a point and click interface. Maybe. Probably not. CT: Just don't try it with a thinkpad style nipple mouse. My wrist lost feeling. Update: 04/18 02:55 PM by T : Read more below for a software project that promises to spread some gestural goodness even further.
Mike Bennett writes with news of his "free software project. It's called wayV, and provides gesture recognition for X. Version 0.1 was released a while ago and let you start applications with gestures, version 0.2 will be released this week and also includes the ability to send keypress, e.g. make a gesture to change desktops, etc." This looks like a modestly conservative 0.1, too;)
"For those not in the know, it's totally invisible." That isn't really true. It only takes a slight movement with the right mouse button held down to activate a gesture in Opera. If you don't know that you have to be very careful when popping up a contextual menu it's very easy to unintentionally make a gesture.
Netscape 4 made the menu context change the top item, so if you tried to do the above over an image (even an invisible one, like one colored like the background) or frames, it wouldn't work--hence it was no longer gestural. (Which sucked. I downloaded the original mozilla source just to fix that for myself.)
It's possible to do more gestures using menus like this (so that it's not really separate gesture code), but gesturing a particular distance is harder than a particular direction.
Pie menus to the rescue! Pie menus open up around the cursor arranged in a circle. By making sure the directions to particular items are always fixed, it can be made gestural. (Not too different from Ken Perlin's alternate PDA input language, actually.)
Pie menus have been around for over ten years. There's pie menu widgets for windows and X, and even a piewm.
I've filed an RFE bug report for mouse gestures in Mozilla. If you'd like to see mouse gestures in Mozilla, please vote for this bug. Of course, you need a Mozilla account to vote on bugs, but you can easily create an account if you don't have one.
Alex Bischoff
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Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Mentor Graphics was the first set of applications that showed me TMTOWTDI. If only Perl would implement it so elegantly... :)
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The guy (formerly) at Purdue would be me. :)
The project is LibStroke.
Current status is that it is fully integrated into FVWM2, gEDA, and a number of other apps. It has also been ported to several languages including tcl, Python, Java, and the original C.
In my, uh, copious spare time, I am working on releasing the newest version which, thanks to the hard work of fellow hackers, is the GNOME-aware version.
The development philosophy is to keep LibStroke a small library that can be built upon to add stroke regcognition to apps.
Mark
I remember back when gesturing the right way to get a computer to do something was considered a joke. You only had to stand on one foot and wave the right way when Win 3.1 wouldn't boot. The "hold button down and slide left" gesture was your way of fingering the computer. On a good day "moving up and then down while holding the button" was a high five. Then again why else would we be in a recession if 1001 things to do with E-Commerce sites wasn't the invention of the day?
Does Opera crash as frequently as B&W?
Do your window decorations morph to reflect the kind of sites you visit?
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So what if you're browsing a pr0n site? How would it react to a "tent raising" gesture?
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
No, it's not new at all. In fact, it's been used all over the place in the gaming world for some time. Good examples are Hybris and Battle Squadron, two Amiga games that used circular motions with the joystick to launch a smart bomb, or separate the wings from the ship. Of course, that was back in the days when gameplay was important, so making the user interface efficient was more of a priority than it is in today's world of flashy graphics and sound but no gameplay.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
they probably have some hidden moves in there:
..gotta be!
while holding ctrl: down, right, middlebuton, rightbutton, rightbutton, P -- pingflood the opposing server
while holding alt: down, up, left, space, (release alt, hold tab) right, down, up, enter -- bypass username/password prompt (to bypass root, press "XYZZY" then enter)
shift-up-left-right -- triple high-kick
there's dozen's more!
-Quazi
...and the new patent on "single gesture response to Amazon's patents"...
"A gesture in which the third digit of either hand is extended while the rest remain closed, and the hand then placed in such a manner that the back of the hand faces towards the recipient, indicating displeasure"
=)
I think that was a troll: Calling for the UI for every application to act like a browser or game seems silly, doesn't it? I'd agree that brainstorming a new interface, or a supplementary interface for gestures, is a good idea.
I remember gestural interfaces having a brief heyday of popularity on the Mac back around 1988-89 when Hypercard came out. They made alot of sense at the time, and I'm not sure why they never caught on with the desktop computing crowd. Other posters are astute in noting that any decent pen based interface such as PalmOS or NewtonOS has relied on gestures for along time now. I definately think NewtonOS had made excellent use of gestures, such as scrubs to erase text.
How about <ctrl-R> or <F5> to reload the document. Holding the mouse button and moving the mouse around to reload sounds more complicated (never tried the b-n-w software, tho').
--
"In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL."
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Your ISP connection never, ever fails.
Your hands must get awfully sore. How many RSI operations have you had lately?
right. what those games needed was a way to issue complex commands quickly, without taking your hands off the input device (or eyes away from the screen).
and for the very same reason, gestures have become an integral part of Alias|Wavefront's Maya (the successor of the infamous PowerAnimator). the gestures take a bit to learn, but once you've got them wired you'll never look back. i know a few artists who have completely removed all of Maya's menu bars and buttons - no need to clutter your screen real estate when everything is available by hitting blank and a few strokes with your pen/mouse. needless to say, their productivity has improved dramatically, and they keep complaining about having to use 'traditional' menus in all those other applications.
Ok how many weeks till we read a story on slashdot along those lines:
"Foobar Inc. has threatedned to sue Opera because Opera browser is using their patented NaturalNav(tm) technology without permission."
Will all the patent insanities happening lately, this will not surprise me.
I wonder if Microsoft had an emergency meeting yet to try to get this into the next version of Windows so they can claim to be innovative.
They probably decided against it because it would be too confusing to the average Windows user.
Sounds like a good opportunity for Apple to innovative too. Increase that market share from 0.1% to 0.2%.
...but its not something I could ever get on with. I always found it quicker to hit the G key for grabbing than I did moving the mouse around in some arcane squiggle. Still, I guess it has its uses.
you get thirty free browser windows in reserve, of course.
"Opera's smooth scroll is just like, well, is this a family web site?"
:-)
Wow.
Now *that* is an endorsement!
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"And people are just figgering out that this widget is in there?"
Ah, no. I've been using it since it first appeared in the beta releases several months ago.
It's just *Hemos* that's finally figured out that it's there.
For me, I find it frustrating using other applications. I keep expecting to use gestures in wordprocessing...
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Or Hemos does have a windoz, contrary his claims? Frankly I don't care if someone has windos or not, use it for game or something else, but what is the point in lying about it?!
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
There's enough of a learning curve involved with sedond and third mouse buttons and shift- and control-click operations to where much of it is used only by "power users". This is interesting, again, for power users. But honestly, the mouse is only an "intuitive" tool when it has one button and no chording or other such behavior modifiers.
Mice have been in the mainstream since 1984. That's 17 years. It's shocking how little innovation there has been in interface design since the Apple Lisa. We're still dealing with mice, overlapping windows with raise/close widgets, modal dialogs and trashcan icons. I look back and remember that Radio Shack had rudimentary speech recogniton and speech synthesis peripherals available in 1981. Mass-produced flat touchscreens go back at least to the GRiDpad. Moving pointers with eye movements was done years ago.
Technologies like handwriting and speech recognition made strides right up to 1984 or so, and then stagnated until a few years ago. Human-language command parsing was coming along well, too, in the mid-1980s and has barely been heard from since. The WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) UI killed off interest in a lot of things.
Things like this gesture stuff--wildly non-intuitive extensions to mouse functionality--are indicative of the myopia and stagnation among interface designers. Mouse "gestures" will be useful to small, technical audiences like engineers, providing a shorthand for dealing with complex visulaization applications. But it's much too reliant on training and so completely non-intuitive that it can never be a viable direction for mainstream UIs.
Why, in the year 2001, some 14 years after GRiD's touchscreen-and-stylus tablets, can't people reading a document onscreen simply touch the corner of a doument and flick it to the left to turn a page? Why can't I pick up a pen and scribble recognizable corrections directly on a spreadsheet? Why, if I do want to use speech dictation software, can't I make corrections with a pen at the same time using standard proofreading marks? And why isn't my speech recognition profile stored on a central sever or on a pocket-sized dongle so I can dictate text from any computer or telephone anywhere? Why are keyboards still being used by people besides programmers, paralegals and data-entry clerks?
Why do command-line OSes not offer plain-English (or French or Mandarin) command recognition? Surely if the parser used in Zork worked as well as it did on a lowly 6502 back in 1981, and I used BBSes with plain-English command recognition ("Go to the library and download 'bluebox.txt'") in 1985, you'd think natural-language access to basic (and not-so-basic) file and system management operations, among other things, would be a piece of cake by now.
This isn't innovation. It's just sort of sad.
It'd be great if Lionhead released their source, including the gesture recognition. But why wait, then there's...
LibStroke - a stroke translation library
Implemented in C, and with a transliterated Java version included as well.
strokes-mode.el - a strokes recognition minor-mode for emacs
Go easier on your wrists, take a break from C-M-A-|, and make vague mouse wavings at emacs to make it do your bidding.
IMHO, the algorithm used in strokes-mode seems much nicer than that in Black & White, or even libstroke. It could be just a matter of parameters, since for all I know B&W and libstroke could use pretty much the same algorithm as strokes-mode.el.
I'm already looking at tweaking the Java libstroke class to play around with it in a few Java apps I'm poking at.
I'll bet this is so they can sell the browser to webpad manufacturers, especially those who aren't going to put Windows on them.
I seem to remember news of a webpad that was going to use BeOS, for example...
I bet if you search through the /. archives for "popmouse" you'll find a few posts by me...
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Sounds kinda like the old pi menus to me.
Cool down, already: Opera is one of the best browsers around for keyboard access, and the best of the GUI browsers. Press Ctrl+J for a list of links on a page. Press Q and A to jump between links, W and S to jump between headings, E and D to jump between elements, Z and X for back and forward, keypad + and - to zoom the entire content in or out...
I'm thinking that the VLSI/logic design tool Mentor Graphics did this too, although it's been a while since I've used it. It did make life a lot easier once you got used to it.
One tool that this would really help with would be the Gimp. Like Menthol Graphics, it has a ton of menu choices and sometimes it's tough to hunt through them all (at least for a Gimp newbie like me). Mouse squiggles would be a neat addition.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Why do people consider "gesturing" a good user interface? It adds more work to already tedious processes and completely ignores any strides made in UI regarding access for those with disabilities. Should we really be tied even more to the mouse? I would like to know the benefit of having a non-visual work-intensive UI versus a visual efficient (less mouse movement and quick/hot-keys) UI. I played Black & White and I couldn't play it for long because of the UI - if I had known it would be like that I wouldn't have bought it. I'm already dealing with RSI and don't feel like having to move my mouse in circular motions repeatedly.
It's nice to have multiple independant systems, however. If one could do everything with ..either.. the keyboard or the mouse, then when things were working well, one would have options, and when something was broken, one would have possibilities.
Of course, there's always the pickaxe through the screen...
But, within reasonable limits, duplications are useful.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No, that's Up, Down, Left, Right, A, B, Start.
:)
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
what happens when you move your mouse up up down down left right left A B B A?
-jason (and his psycho alter ego, jyee)
We used an interface like this for VLSI circuit design back when I was at Purdue. The package was called Mentor Graphics, and their term for this type of interface was "strokes". You could even add your own, and it was extremely intuitive after you spent a half-hour fiddling with it. It saved a TON of time-- the interface to Mentor is pretty heavy without it. Lots of deep, nonintuitive menus.
Although I haven't played B&W, we used a gesture interface in the Mentor Graphics circuit design package at Purdue. The problem you mention with mouse sensitivity (and dodgy mice, too) was a serious problem in the labs, since those machines took a lot of abuse, and had huge monitors with tiny little arcane menus. But the gestures are size-independent and work anywhere on the screen, and so as long as you make approximately the same shape the gesture works. This is an excellent alternative to menus when the menus are a pain in the butt.
Hemos...just yesterday there was this post:
:)
Posted by Hemos on Tuesday April 17, @11:29AM
from the i-wish-this-was-more-like-this dept. "It's a Windows app, so I'm not able to run it. Neither do I have a CueCat -- but apps like this make me smile. "
With regards to the cuehack story. Now you tell us "I've been playing a fair amount of B&W lately "....
Ok....are you playing it on Linux or do you just talk out your butt alot? I am not trolling here...I am serious! Don't give us the "I can't run a windows app" crap anymore...we know you have a windows machine in there.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Sometime ago I wrote pie menus for Gtk+ (pie menu extends the ability of common menus by "gesture recognition").
I think I revive my almost two years old project and implement pie menus as a gtk theme (some Gtk+ developers suggested that)
... on one gesture shopping.
Oops. My mouse slipped.
There was a windows program called Pointix that allowed you to navigate the web with what they called "glicks". A counter-clockwise circular motion would mean "back" for instance. I forget what it was called, but I was using it in, well, late 1998. It had lots of different gestures that were all programmable.
The web site and domain, pointix.com, are junk now, but this was a really cool program. Along with GetRight it's one of the two programs I ever registered.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Ah ... I can see Jeff Bezos filling out the zero-click shopping patent application right now.
I've been using a bit of software from Sensiva to do this with my tablet for a while - and it works across any application not just the web.
They seem to have versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.
I missed having the thumb button on my mouse which was set to back until i found this.
-- "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
Well I have never found it and I can't find it in the latest version for Linux either... is this a windows only feature?
Check out MKDoc a mod_perl CMS
Design Architect by Mentor Graphics has offered this on their Windows NT port and SUN ports for years now. Moreover, it is fully customizable for each user some screenshots can be found here: http://www.scudc.scu.edu/mentortu/mg_da_04.html#ED IT
and the homepage of mentor graphics is:
http://www.mentorg.com/designarchitect/
Check it out, it is quite interesting and puts the opera system to shame.
-eric
-eric
If you are arguing that there is some "user interface" context definition of gesture which disallows clicking a button, then fine, and I think giving the taxonomy which include strokes, gestures, and whatever else would be interesting. But getting away from human-computer interaction, I'd say that the presence or absence of "contact", if you'll allow that analogy to the mouse click, doesnt preclude these other things form being gestural in nature.
B&W doesn't have gesture based navigation. You gesture for common commands (pick up leash, drop leash, change leash, perform miracle, perform special move). Which is really more what Opera appears to be doing - the most common browser commands happen to be navigation.
PalmOS did this earlier, the most common PDA commands are "input character", "delete", "select", and "scroll". In turn, this comes from writing and proofer's marks (you know, omit, insert, new paragraph. These have a proper name?), which is just recording gestures (the written alphabet, the marks) in pen and ink for later use. You might argue that drag-and-drop, especially in the context of cut-and-paste, is gestural input.
I'm not discounting the usefulness, or the novelty of incorporating gestures into a standard WIMP interface application. I'm just putting a little perspective on the above quote.
Photoshop has really great accelerators - it takes a while to use them, but I could do what you describe with:
;-)
ctl + (zoom in) (hold space anywhere and move the mouse to scroll window at all times - MUCH quicker than scrollbars.)
OR
z (zoom tool) and drag out a zoom marquee
THEN
m (marquee tool), ctl c (copy), ctl n (new doc - bash return for default settings), ctl v (paste).
There you go - 5 gestures, no menus
Because each gesture is a real world key press it works out 3 times as fast as casting a spell in black and white...
If you like keyboard shortcuts, photoshop is a dream to use.
+++++
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The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
I haven't played B&W yet (need to, want to, it's just been a busy few weeks), but I can certainly see a use for this in a browser. When I read the headline here about Opera implementing actual support for gestures, I was immediately interested because I already find myself doing something very similar in Internet Explorer using the mousewheel.
Pressing the mousewheel button in IE has the effect of placing it into "scroll-mode", where moving the mouse then rapid-scrolls in that direction. It's become such a habit for me to just hit the mousewheel-button and then move the mouse up rapidly to emulate a "Home" keypress without going to the keyboard. Similar results can be obtained for "End".
Believe it or not, I'm so used to doing this that I just haven't been able to move over to Mozilla as a result. I personally hope to see gesture support picked up by Mozilla at some point in time so that I could do something similar there.
Of course, I'm really a keyboard person at heart, but web browsers just don't have the support for keystrokes that they should (e.g. Why does "tab" always take you to the first link at the top of the page you are viewing rather than starting in the current viewport? How about support for something like "20 <tab>" to take me to the 20th link on the screen? Etc., etc.)
If I'm stuck using the mouse for web pages, I really don't want to have to switch over to the keyboard just to go to the top or bottom of the page. And I'd prefer not having to move my mouse over to the scroll bar either since, being so close to the edge of the window, it's all too easy to miss-click and activate the window behind the browser.
Simple gestures (nothing complex like drawing a square or anything) seem like a great answer to me.
The software we (http://www.5dt.com/) used to distribute with our Data Glove product had a demo that mapped gestures to actions way back in 1995 already. Some of our applications use it too, not unlike the way it appears in B&W. Our current glove driver has some simple gesture recognition built into it. Granted, this is "real" hand gestures, not gestures using the mouse, so it probably isn't quite the same thing.
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In fact, I still believe it would be faster with regular icons (a miracle forest or a teleport gesture still takes 2-3 seconds - clicking is just clicking). I mean, the icons are still there, you just can't click on 'em as you used to.
Sure it's a cool feature, but it's more like a gameplay feature than a real improvement in user interfaces. It's hard for me that this would be of any real use in other applications. It's fun, but not much more.... unless there is something I'm missing?
Just add voice recognition, and then you can move on to grunt navigation. It has taken years, but now my wife know that when she is helping me work on the car, "unhh" means "hand me that rachet". "SHIT" means "get me a bandaid".
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Nipple Mouse? I can't believe the kind of low-brow humor we see on Slashdot these days! The proper term is "titmouse"
/me ducks.
-ben.c
Mentor Graphics had this same thing a long time ago - you could use various strokes (I believe that is what they were called) to perform various actions in their VLSI program. Most people I knew relied on this heavily - once you got the hang of it, it was very efficient.
Someone I knew at Purdue had started incorporating something like this in FVWM, I believe, but I don't know how far he got (this was several years ago)
Hmmm... I'd like to see some features like this incorporated in KDE/GNOME (maybe even Windows XP.. er, scratch that thought).
spoo
This must be how Dust Puppy navigates the net.
Best Slashdot Co
Yes, and if it has lots of "option" keys, say 3 called "control", "meta" and "shift", we could get hundreds of commands with just 3 or 4 keys held down simultaneously. Commands like "control+meta+shift+!". And we could call the editor "editor macros" or "emacs" for short.
Best Slashdot Co
Alias|wavefront's PowerAnimator (and later Maya) use something quite similar, and very powerful. When you click/hold with a certain combination, (left+right buttons?) a "sundial" of choices (8 menu items arranged radially around the cursor point) appears. Moving over each of those provides a sub-sundial of choices around that spot.
The really cool part was that (like any good HI component) the menu choices only popped up if you waited long enough to need them (to refresh your memory), but the actions you performed gesturing with the mouse would take place if they weren't there. So if you knew that North-then-SouthWest was where you had stored a particular command, you could make this gesture with the mouse without waiting for the menu to appear.
On top of all that, the menus were user-customizable. Really, truly, a power-user's interface designed to make you as efficient as possible. And this was back in...1996? 1997?
Disclaimer: I remember this in Maya 1.0, which was the last version I used. I assume it's still in there.
Fascinating but nowhere near new:
This has been around since '95.
By extension of the centremost carpal structure in the dexerous hemisphere of a member of the Homo sapiens species, Amazon is able to communicate an intent to undertake legal action from a distance in a single action.
Subsidiary to this is a patent on a client side response service where consumers grab their ankles and pucker their sphincter to accomodate the writ serving protocol.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
There has been a windows freeware utility from a company called pointix that added mouse gesture navigation a loooong time ago. Pick it up here or do a search at downloads.com for 'Pointix'.
Unfortunately Pointix does not support/sell/publicize this nifty utility anymore!
Adi.
Great, now I can do Tai Chi and use my computer at the same time.
It's good to see people coming up with ways to allow mouse users to cahieve their goals more quickly.
I wonder though whether it will end here. We already have 3 button mice, 5 buttin mice (yes, the "wheel" is actually buttons 4 & 5) Adding any more buttons would have been silly to operate with one hand, so they invented "gesture" control.
Maybe the next step could be to make it two handed. Give it a more rigid design (say a static board shaped design) and that would allow the hands to more more independently of it thus making the addition of many more buttons a better option.
They could call it a "button board" or even a "keyboard" that would be cool, and allow VERY fast control of apps once learned. Now if only all the applications were optimised for this kind of input. Maybe we could have an editor that was optimised for this so called "keyboard"! we could name it "vi"
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Great stuff ... but it would be nice if Mac Opera supported Java applets ... OR IF NOT ... supported the "NOJAVA" property in Javascript.
I'm thinking of a gesture
Well I have to say I'm very glad to see this actually making some inroads to normal applications. What Lionhead did with Black and White is nothing new. Mentor Graphics has been doing this with their EDA packages for a very long time, probably most notably with Design Architect.
Want help? Draw a question mark.
Add a wire? Single stroke down.
Add a bus? Single stroke up.
Undo? Sort of a upside down n
Copy? A C shape
Delete? A D shape
And too many more to count. For years I've wished there were some overlay utility for nearly any OS where I could define macro keys to go with stroke commands (using the middle button). Someone used to the stroke commands can get things done VERY quickly (and it looks pretty cool because if you're looking over their shoulder, they can go through pages and dialog boxes with no easily discernable way).
Hooray for Opera for spotting the use for it.
You can get around just fine in B&W by using mostly the keyboard, with minimal to moderate mouse usage. Try paying attention to the tutorial next time.
***
infinitely more flexible than typical WIMP operations.
For those who haven't been using computers for 20 years ---
WIMP - Windows Icons Mouse & Pointer.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
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This is a post to other newbies explaining that the moderation system isn't perfect.
It'll get moderated down as off-topic.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
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"For those not in the know, it's totally invisible." That isn't really true. It only takes a slight movement with the right mouse button held down to activate a gesture in Opera. If you don't know that you have to be very careful when popping up a contextual menu it's very easy to unintentionally make a gesture.
That happened to me last time I played with Opera, too.
The shareholder is always right.
so try opera.. you won't find better shortkeys (btw, how do you do back with alt-backspace and one hand?!).
in opera, back and forth is "z" and "x", switch between open sites is "1" and "2" (comparable to alt-tab), switching graphics on and off is "g", switching between the user.css (for instance big letters, black on gray for better reading) is ctrl-g, zooming in/out is "+" and "-" and so on...
SEO Test: TIGI und SEBASTIAN - Online Shop - V
Great, just what we need. The ability to surf the web with one hand while the other ahem...does something else...
True GESTURES use no mouse button; they just watch the pattern of position over time.
In Black & White, and in other applications that use a mouse to detect gestures, those mouse actions that do not require the buttons to be GESTURES. Drag & Drop is not a GESTURE but a direct interaction with the objects involved. Tooltips use the simplest of GESTURES: hovering in place. No mouse button.
On PalmOS and other devices where the pen must actually touch the screen to have its position registered, I would still call them STROKES, not GESTURES. Most artists' pen tablets can register the position of the pen if the pen is merely close to the tablet, not even touching, and therefore can support GESTURES.
[
"Video bona proboque; deteriora sequor." -- Ovid
It was used to give your troops a direction to face after you had clicked the spot you wanted them. A small little flick of the mouse as you released the button. I found it quite efficient but not all the masses had the dexterity to pull it off so they later added a button to trigger the directional control.
And Quantel have been doing it for 15 years on their video equipment. But we're in a circle game where everything old is new again so it doesn't matter. Oh, knowing Quantel they probably patented it too.
I use gestures to start X applications.
See http://freshmeat.net/projects/wayv/
Just need a nice LCD on the dashboard, a keyboard, and a few thousand dollards (and hours) and I could drive down the highway with my mouse...
;)
And, I could use my custon quake keyboard mappings to help out with the paintball gun mounted under the hood...
How exactly is waving the mouse around easier than hitting a a control-key combo, for instance? Is it quicker for me to click and drag my mouse (while violating twenty-odd years of WIMP standards...) than to quickly tap ALT-LeftArrow? Doesn't there seem to be a huge margin of error. Imagine assigning "delete-this-file-irretreivebly" (in Konqy, for instance) to click-drag-up, while having click-drag-up mean "move-up-directory". All it would take is for a little bump while moving your mouse.
This just sounds like a silly little gimmick.
Except, I guess, if you have a motor problem, then maybe the impreciseness of this technique could be an advantage.
My party was for Shift-Ctrl-Click 'New Window in Background'. That is without a doubt my favorite features (apart from the whole 'self contained' bit), and the feature I miss the most in EVERY other brower!
And it can be gestured with 'Down Up' on a link! Woop! :)
Just wondering, I've been pondering a Mac purchace just for OS X for a few months now, and it'd be nice to be able to use Sensiva with it...
This is a very good example of providing a good user interface.
For those not in the know, it's totally invisible.
For those in the know, it's available right there and then!
I just wish all software was this user friendly..
Stop the brainwash
This works for quite a few Konami Nintendo games IIRC. You can do it a couple ways. I've got it to work by doing both of these:
Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start
Up Down Up Down Left Left Right Right B A Start
I don't think the order matters too much.
-Brett
Does Opera support java applets like in
Live charts
They already have a "gesture recognition" appy available for Win/Mac/Linux. Its <a href="http://www.sensiva.com">Sensiva</a> It's not open source, but its free, and its quite nifty (I find myself using it more than the buttons on the top corner, saves time and energy.
It also has "plugins" so you can customize gestures per application. I hope this helps.
aka the Clitoris Mouse... ;)
h
So did my nipple.
Of course there is a strong need for consistency, and gestures don't preclude that by any means. We need to finally escape from the 30 year old WIMP model which was originally developed at PARC for children under 5 years old. Evolve man!
Ah found it on the Aminet - it was called Stroke. So there ya go.
It works better with a direct pointing device like a pen, less well with an indirect pointing device like a mouse, and badly with a velocity pointing device, like a joystick or force-sensing button. Basically, if you can't handwrite with the input device, gestural input will be a pain.
With regards to a standard set of gestures. Yes that definitely needs to be decided - so please mail me if you're interested in that.
BTW future steps for gesture computing include inputing gestures via a camera - and on and off I work on that :)
Zoom into an image in photoshop, select a square capture to clipboard, paste into new image. If I can do that with a few gestures rather than 8 different menu commands, I will have sped up my image processing dramatically without having to write a complex script or plugin to do it for me.
You know, there are those nice little buttons called Actions, pretty much what you are asking for me thinks.
This isnt revolutionary.. who here hasnt used a Handheld Computing device?
Many web sites do not allow the user to right-click, in an attempt to "protect" their "content" by using EcmaScript to disable the contextual menu that accesses "Save Image As..." and "View Source." This is a Bad Thing, as if even the Back button is moved to the right mouse button, the webmaster has complete control over your browsing. It's also annoying for those with disabilities such as dial-up connection.
(Read More...)
Tip: IE doesn't completely disable right-click. When the dialog pops up, keep holding the right mouse button and press Enter. Release to get your contextual menu.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Personally I think gestures are great if you work with a stylus, but mice are too clumsy to precisely use them. Even with my Palm Pilot it is not uncommon for it to screw up a gesture I make.
Anyone who's played Black and White will know that gesture navigation is actually a major pain in the butt to use. Sure it's novel, but frantically waving the mouse around for several seconds in some pattern does not make for a quick and useful interface, especially when it fails a good portion of the time.
Mentor Graphics ECAD/CAM tools have had "strokes" for a long time now.
It's such a good idea it probably would've been copied before now, but I have a bad feeling what'll happen to Opera once Mentor lawyers get a whiff of this.
If they've not patented this by now, someone else has.
I really like what Opera is has been doing with their browser. It makes it hard to stick to one browser with all the improvements to the various ones (Mozilla, Konquerer, Opera, etc.)
I haven't tried the new Opera, but there's no reason they would have to take away your right-click pop-up menu to give you gestures. A single click with no dragging can just be a particular "gesture" which invokes the "popup-menu" function.
Anyone know if this is indeed what Opera does? I would be ticked if I lost my right-click menus too.
People used to make fun of me for associating those things on the thinkpads with nipples. Now I have proof that it's not just me. Of course, now I'm stuck with the sobering reality that it's the closest I'll get to touching an erect nipple for a very long time... Damn.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I do think it's good that unusual and innovative methods of software control are being tried out, especially in a respected piece of software like Opera. Maybe this will get the ball rolling, but to tell you the truth I can't see this sort of thing being standard in any M$ apps any time soon. Users who need the Paperclip to help them "save as" aren't going to like the mousing equivalent of waving one's hands in the air :-) Maybe it could be implemented as a "power user" setting.
Freedom: "I won't!"
There is piece of CAD software called ARRIS that has been doing this for years. I rather like it, but it's not that new.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
This is quite intresting. Finaly something truely new in UI design. I wonder if GNOME (or KDE) will implement this in the near-future?
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Not a typewriter
Hehe, I yet to be able to cast that fireball spell in Black and White successfully on purpose, though I did manage to cast it ONCE by accident!
Err, I now use the M key to switch to magic mode and if I need to cast the last spell I also use the R key instead of trying 4 or 5 times to make a gesture. If I was artisticaly inclined then I wouldn't be using a computer now would I? (eh shutup, I am a purist, all you artisty types go fuck yourselves!)
Hehe, I have always just considered hitting the back button on my mouse (I have a MERE 8 buttons on my current optical mouse that I bought for $20, damn generic products and tradeshows go so well together!) to be alot faster then some awkward gester system. . . . .
Err, I like hotkeys, hehe.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Okay, this gesture thingee may be a Cool Thing, but I'm more in favour of a user-friendly keyboard navigation. Pressing TAB two zillion times to select the link you need is unfortunately not an alternative for mouse torture.
While you're clutching at the mouse, finding the cursor on your screen, then navigating to the close button, I've already hit Ctrl-W and done eighteen other tasks.
But I already have my hand on the mouse. That's why those mouse gestures are so great.
I'm a big fan of keyboard commands, but you have it backwards. When I'm using my browser, I'm holding my mouse. The other hand is on the keyboard, but for commands like ALT-F4 I need two hands. Holding the right button and moving right, then down, is much faster. To go three pages back: normally I'd hit ALT-left three times. Now, I hold the right button and click the left button three times. It really speeds things up. In fact, I use it so often that when using another browser, I'm annoyed when I find out it doesn't work.
with the new Theremin Interface! With just two metal rods mounted on your monitor you can control your PC by just waving your hands in front of the screen!!!
Actually, that would be rather cool.... Especially if it still made the oooEEEOoooouuuUU noises.
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
Shouldn't there be a sort of consistency among the different applications used within one GUI. Before you know it, we are back in the 'goold' old DOS day, where every application was setting it's own standards (remember WordPerfect?). These gestures would only be nice if they were an integral part of the GUI, and thus useable for all applications.
Using gestures as an interface option just reminds me of a movie where the "user" wore gloves to navagate the "net". Smacking their hands together to open a connection. (I can't remember the name of it!!) In all likelyhood this will become the interface of the future unless/until "wet wiring" becomes mainstream.
All those hours at the Street Fighter machines are actually spent on building transferable skills. Can we all do fireball + uppercuts? Those mouse navigation moves reads just like a moves-list!
I only use gestures in Black and White to the extent that I have to due to lack of keyboard equivalents. I use the keyboard to move, and I'm just happy I realized that you can press "R" to repeat the last miracle...
If you don't want my koalas, baby, don't shake my eucalyptus tree.
It's just sad that it came out of a game house instead of application programmers.
Wrong. Mentor Graphics have been doing gesture-based input for some time. I have personally seen it in one of their products at my work a couple of years ago. Also, read comment #8 (sorry, can't get <a> hyperlink to work).
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Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness. -- Bertrand Russell
The gestures work really well, in my experience. I was annoyed earlier cause they took the "close window" command out of their rightclick context menu -- I'm lazy enough so's I don't like moving the mouse all the way up to point at the X or all the way down to their built-in taskbar thingy to close it that way -- but now the gestures solve that problem perfectly. Drag down then right with right mouse and the window closes - it's beautiful. Drag down then up on a link and the link opens in a new window behind the current one - also beautiful. I learned the gestures that I use (not all of them, but a useful few) the first day I got the browser, I've rarely triggered them accidentally, and they save me miles of pointing.
On a side note, the browser's amazingly quick and stable nowadays compared to its competitors -- so good I may even pay for it....
It was just added in version 5.10, which came out a week or two ago.
Hmmm....Do Glyphs sound familiar??
Oh YEAH!!! THAT's the system that LucasArts couldn't get functioning right for their Jedi Knight Sequel "Obi-Wan"!!
Now I remember...
SO.....this DOESN'T work?
Ooooohhhh...It DOES work....
So Why was the game cancelled then?
Sig currently under construction. Mind the gap....
Just how revolutionary is this gimmick if people have not even noticed it for weeks or months? And if people have not noticed this bell and whistle before, is it even news?
or does this fall into the category of if it is a major bug, it is news, but if it is an anti-bug (ie, a feature) then let the PR department deal with it.
on a separate front, I can see this when 3D interfaces become popular for computers. You'd have a widget in your hand for interfacing with the machine, and operate the unit by gestures.
The similarity of this to a magician with a magic wand is *purely* coincidental.
:)
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I noticed this past weekend that I had been playing B&W way too much when I was gesturing rather than doing things... but it was mostly that I saw everything in the 'real' world in a manner close to the B&W interface... I thought I was a hand for a moment.
But what really scared me was when I noticed something new, I made a face and pointed at it! Not to mention I was starting to take on other similar attributes of my creature! ACK!
... if I'm in Opera and I hit Up, Up, Down, Down, Left Right, Left Right, BA Start?
...read the various combinations and think to themselves, "Back Forward Punch... Sonic Boom!"
So are we going to see the Opera strategy guide with the full list of key/mouse combos?
I think I'll start working on a project to create a device that will take me to google when I snap my fingers, to amazon when I pull out my credit card, and slashdot when I give it the finger.
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
maybe people should start for gestures to be put into lotsa different things.. in black&white (the short time i played it, until i found i had nfi howto finish level 3), i found gestures really fun, easy, and useful..
;p)
like, wouldnt it be awsome if kde implemented them.. circle your mouse around to maximize and stuff like that.. (especially if it did the little animation that happens in b&w
so yer.. this is my call to have them put in lotsa things.. itd rock!
stuff
Even though the page is apparently being slashdotted,I find it somewhat ironic that I spent 5 mintues staring at the "fastest browser on earth" banner while waiting for the page to load...
Yeah, I got a good gesture for Bezos and his one click shopping.
Sounds like a neat enough idea, but when will someone solve the eternal bane of the net- "left hand mouse syndrome?"
Agent out.
http://www.davecentral.com/11049.html
If a synchronized swimmer drowns, do they all drown?
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
How did that get a "redundant"? I can't see any other posts explaining to newbies what "WIMP" stands for.
The "OT" I put in the title stands for "off-topic". Its a pretty standard spoiler, so that people can see from the subject line that the post is OT, and don't have to waste their time reading OT posts if they don't want to. So I realise its OT, and don't mind if it gets modded down as such.
Don't try using gesture navigation with a dirty mouse, either. And unless you wear gloves and work in a clean room, every mouse is gonna eventually get dirty.
If the world's moving towards using gestures, better buy a tablet.
This is the (real) innovation we've been waiting for. It's just sad that it came out of a game house instead of application programmers.
Uh, Ah-hah, EXCUSE ME?? Sad?!!
If only we paid more attention to the innovations coming out of games houses, we'd be somewhat further ahead.
Don't forget the mountain of ordinary people who have learned their 'computer skills' on the Playstation: because the interfaces are simply more intuitive.
Why? Because they deal with real-stuff-like interaction.
If rating the Spiro navigation makes me sad, then I'm happy....
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I'm using one called sensiva from
http://www.sensiva.com>
right now as a matter of fact and have been for a month or so now...
it works great for surfing draw a line to the left to nav back right for forward.
I wonder if you waggle your middle digit in front of the monitor you will arrive at www.microsoft.com.
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--hongpong.com
Oh great, I can see it now when Apple adopts the gesture system: They'll come out with the latest greatest "no-button" mouse! No longer will the user have to be confused about what the button might do when pressed!
-Kallahar
The netscape version (4.07) I use at work uses gesture recognition for ages. It crashes every time I give it the finger...
I intend to live forever, so far so good.
...I can't use opera to even browse slashdot because it doesn't handle cookies properly.
I do belive it's Up,Up,Down,Down, Left,Right,Left,Right, BA Select Start ... and you should get the ultra secret Cheat menu where you can remove those damn ads...
"Madness and Genius are separated solely by Degrees of Success." -Unknown
However, it will be nearly impossible for people unfamiliar with computes to master. They'll be clicking and dragging the mouse in every direction at once and not having any idea what just happened. It's hard enough to get them to understand Ctrl + key functions.
Still, it's terrifically easy and intuitive. The only other problem I see is if other programs start having their own different set of mouse gestures and confusing everyone.
What's sad is not the fact that the game houses are innovating and creating great new concepts and ideas for interacting with one's computers.
What's sad *is* the fact that a lot of programmers refuse to think like non-programmers and design interfaces that are truly beautiful to see and use, like B&W's.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
This is the (real) innovation we've been waiting for. It's just sad that it came out of a game house instead of application programmers.
Think about it: The one reason that many people think that command prompt shells are superior to 'gruntnclick' is that the ability to use written language and commands is infinitely more flexible than typical WIMP operations. Despite the fact that it's slower than Grandma before she's had her prunes, most of the developers I know eventually drop down to csh or bash to get 'any real work' done.
Gesture systems, provided in combo with typical WIMP operations, have the potential to change that. If there is a gesture for every non-destructive command, and gestures can be stacked so that you can direct the output of one gesture command into another, you've created a truly flexible and intuitive command interface.
I've been playing B&W since it came out, and in only a couple weeks, I can shoot fireballs and sheild spells around like no one's business. I suspect that this will be true for a great majority of computer users. Not all, but enough to make the project worth it.
Zoom into an image in photoshop, select a square capture to clipboard, paste into new image. If I can do that with a few gestures rather than 8 different menu commands, I will have sped up my image processing dramatically without having to write a complex script or plugin to do it for me.
Now Lionhead has talked a little bit about releasing their source code if the game becomes popular enough. What I would like to see is source for their gesture recognition systems so that it can be integrated into KDE and Gnome, and OS plugins for Win32 and MacOS. With the level of interest in this new system, that may not even be necessary.
This *will* work. Get behind it, guys!
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I don't see what's so great about this Opera gesture system. I've been trying to throw a fireball on those banner ads for the last hour and I still can't get it to work. Needs some bugs worked out if you ask me.
It actually worked well in my opinion, I'm not sure if it isn't supported any more or just isn't enabled at my current company. Time to drag out the manuals to see and maybe relearn SKILL.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
doing things by the way you shake the mouse is not new.
back in 1997, there was a now defunct company called pointix which had a product by the same name (i think). they had patented what they called "glicks". you could run a command or drop a popup menu if u drag the mouse along x or y axis, u could also do a P and a mirror-P.
alias|wavefront (http://www.aliaswavefront.com/, also http://www.billbuxton.com/) has a very useful gesture based menu called "marking menu" in its Power Animator and Maya software. basically u drag in one of the 8 directions (W, E, N, S, NE, NW, SE, SW) at the end of which there is a command. its very nicely implemented. u hold the space bar in any window and drag in the direction. if u persist holding the space bar, the marking menu pops up, so u can select it. this is very useful in the earlier stages when u r learning the menu. when u have become familiar, u just drag along the direction and the command is selected. i think it would be terribly cool if marking menus are implemented in general purpose GUIs.
the grafiti on the palm pda and sensiva (http://www.sensiva.com/) are similar but worthy examples.
the getsture based stuff from lionhead is based on these previous works...whether it advances this significantly, i dont know cos i have not played the game.
cheers,
No I won't have to sit up and click the next arrow!!!!!!!
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
In 1987, the Logitech mouse shipped with a character-mode text editor called 'Point'. It used mouse gestures to perform basic text-editing functions (home, end, cut, copy, paste, etc). I used it for a while and got quite comfortable with it, but then TPTB found out and forced me to toe the party line and use SPF-PC (yuck!).
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www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Cops: ID please Jedi gesture Me: You do not need to see my id
Gesture navigation was a trick demonstrated in one of my favorite Hypercard books waaaay back in the FIRST Bush Administration, you know, the dark ages.
Hypertalk was a major influence on JavaScript.
Gestures are nice, but they're only useful in a very few circumstances. Too many gestures make it possible that uninitiated users could do them by accident. I can think of only two areas where I'd like to use gestures with links:
My father is a blogger.
Gesture navigation is slow with a mouse, and because of that gimicy. It's much faster to use a shortcut key or click the appropriate button. Tablets are a bit different but aren't really all that common in genral. I would hesitate to call holding a button down and moving the mouse right (or left. Depends on if you want to pull the page to the mouse, or move the mouse to the page) to go back in a browser a gesture. In the most basic sence it is, but it seems more akin to the way you push and pull veiws around in 3D programs. If anything I'd like to see the other features of black and white such as pushing your veiw around, and zooming in and out become common in a gui. Pulling your veiw around is, I find, a much easier way to scroll than any other method with a mouse. A shame it's not an option with most programs. Zooming in would also be great for changing context levels. eg. Imagine going to slashdot and seeing everything as it is currently. Then holding your mouse button and pulling back to zoom out and see only the current headlines. Move your mouse over a headline and zoom in to center it on the page as it would apear normally. Then zoom in again to get comments. Zoom in even further on a post to see its threads. Then it would only take a few seconds to zoom all the way out again. Just like B&W. Clicking links doesn't allow context change that quickly. Slashdot is probably a bad example because connections aren't generally fast enough to allow this, but if you continue the idea onto other apps, I'm sure you can see the posible advantages of using the mouse to change context levels quickly.
Just bought a Wacom Graphire pen tablet yesterday
(4x5in active area). It comes with a program called Sensiva
(windows) that does just this, it works with windows in
general and has plugins to customize with new gestures for
different apps.
I have to say the single most frustrating and annoying thing I can have on my computer is a dodgy mouse. One slip of the ball and one gesture could easily become another. "Reload Page" might become "Post flamebait to /." ;0).
Spare us 10p for a graphics tablet!
"Don't get mad, get a monkey!"
villager: "We need more poooorn."
whisper: "Pooooooooooooorrrrrrnnn"
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I read this paper titled Contextual Animation of Gestural Commands a while back, found it fascinating and wondered when we were going to see some practical applications. I'm glad to see Opera et. al. trying the gesture nav approach.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
The key advantage of gestures is that the user can specify a command and an operand all in the same motion. It takes less cognition than making a selection and then going to a menu/palette to select a command.
They are quite useful for pen-based devices, which have made a comeback in the last few years, but can be hard to learn for beginners. One innovation is marking menus, which pop-up a pie menu if you move the mouse slowly, but if you move quickly the pie menu never pops up and the resulting mouse movement is simply a gesture (for the expert).
We have created several research systems at Berkeley that use gestures (e.g., DENIM, a sketch-based web design tool.) We have also created tools and toolkits for creating gesture-based applications. Quill is a tool for training a popular gesture-recognition algorithm (by Rubine) that you could then easily incorporate in your own Java applications (our release includes Rubine's algorithm). SATIN is a toolkit for creating pen-based applications and includes hooks for the recognizers and pen-aware widgets like pie-menus.
All of our code is open source, so feel free to download any of these systems or the source, try them out, and tell us what you think.
James
Gestures, like symbols, are universal! It's one of the best ways to rembember something, like when you write down on paper a phone number you want to remember, or road signs that are pretty much the same across all countries. Opera's gestures work only within Opera... Instead there's a piece of software called Sensiva that provides gesture commands on ALL applications and customizable at will. I use it everyday without even thinking about it, so I guess they've built a truly intuitive interface. I'm sure this could help making Linux more accessible to the consumer.