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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;)
...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"
=)
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.
... on one gesture shopping.
Oops. My mouse slipped.
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.
Actually, this concept is really not that new. Check out the Strokes extension in Emacs and XEmacs. It does this very thing. You can teach it various patterns, and then you can use those patterns to execute commands. Heck, now that I think about it, you could integrate Strokes and Emacs W3 to do exactly what Opera is doing...
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!
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