Mouse Gestures Gain Followers

StefMeister writes "According to this article at ZDNet, the use of the mouse using 'mouse gestures' (as introduced in Opera) is gaining a lot of followers. Personally, I almost solely use the keyboard as input device, but it might be interesting for others. Although changing the way people are accustomed to working is always tricky." I certainly enjoy gestures in Mozilla, thanks to OptiMoz.

Comments

The mouse-wheel

[garoush]

After the buttons on a mouse, I find the mouse-wheel to be the most attractive and useful feature. Just think how much you save yourself by using the wheel to scroll up/down in your application and keep the arrow focused on the screen not to mention, using one finger.

You can take away all mouse-gestures and I won't complain, but I will get mad as hell if you give me a mouse without a wheel.

Black and white??? Bluck

[victim]

So your playing B&W, you are half way through a gesture to create water on your poor people and the game decides to autosave, freezing input in the middle of the gesture. So you try to recover and complete the gesture or at least make it do something sane, but no. You get a fireball or something and incinerate your people. Bad god. Maybe the PC version of BW is better, but the Mac version could inspire one to injure the programmers.

Galeon on the other hand has nice gesture support.

Mouse Gestures and radial context menus

[carlmenezes]

Though radial context menus are supposed to be faster than mouse gestures, I disagree for one simple reason :

You need to click twice - once to start the radial menu, and once more to confirm your choice. Also the fact that the menu moves with the mouse is a tad dis-orienting when you're trying to learn them (compared to this, mouse gestures have a much smaller learning curve).

I've tried both for quite some time now and gestures definitely win. Ofcourse, that's because I'm using a mouse.

I could definitely see trackball users getting a lot of good use out of radial context menus.

Anyway, both these features go a LONG way in bringing converts into the mozilla camp and that's a good thing for Open Source.

Optimoz gestures rule! Challenge me!

[tommut]

If you configure the mozilla gestures to best suit you, they can make you more productive than just using shortcut key combinations I think. I would like to see a challenge between my setup with optimoz gestures and someone solely using their keyboard or any other mechanism (radial menus, etc). I seriously think gestures (when configured correctly) can be quicker than most anything.

The configuration can is key. It should be suited to what you as a user can do most efficiently. I have the left mouse button mapped to do the gesturing because that's where my finger naturally rests and I'm quicker with the left button than the right button (don't know why.)

Left and right gestures are mapped to back and forward in the browser history. I have the intellimouse with the back and forward buttons, but I honestly find that the gestures are faster. Just make a quick, slight milisecond movement and you go back a page. Sweet. When I use a browser without gestures and I am actually forced to move my mouse up to click the Back button, I now get so frustrated because it feels like going back to 56k after getting used to a T1.

I have UP mapped to open a new tab, and DOWN mapped to close tab. I like this a lot because I'm always opening up new tabs. With just a quick flick, I have a new window open. And I can quickly close down any tab when I'm done looking at it, and I'm right back at the previous tab. All this without having to move my mouse location.

That's what I love most about gestures is that I can keep my mouse cursor at it's original location; I don't have to move it to close a tab or open a tab. I don't even have to have my hand on the keyboard.

Another important key is to keep the gestures short. None of this Right-Down-Up-Left stuff. I like clean, simple, one-or-two direction gestures. I have all my oft-used functions as short gestures. Reload (Down-Up). Add bookmard (Down-Right)...

Here is my favorite optimized gesture experience. I gesture up once - a new tab is opened. I gesture Left-Right, and Google opens in the new tag. That is, I have Left-Right mapped to go to my home page. So with 3 quick movements I can have google open in a new tab window. That's pretty damn cool.

In closing, my mozilla browsing experience has certainly skyrocketed after I discovered gestures. I would seriously like to see a Mozilla Browsing Efficiency Challenge (MBEC). I think the person armed with the right gestures would be a serious contender.

Gestures at the X (or WM) level -- done in Lisp

[deenoman]

hey,

If anyone has even used the strokes-mode in (X)Emacs, I have taken that to the X level by writing what is a higher-level application of gesture recognition. Consider this:

Why should each application implement gestures differently? For example WM commands (close, kill, iconify, maximize, resize, etc.) apply to all windows. Then, within each application, you might imagine some application-specific gestures. This can all be done at the X level. I decided to take the elisp code that's been doing gestures in (X)Emacs since '97 and ported it to Common Lisp (using GNU CLISP). This implementation if CL is GPL'd, and has an implementation of Xlib (called CLX) that plugs right in.

Anyway, CLISP is just about as portable as gcc is, so the same goes for the CL version of strokes.

What I havn't done, though, is to build a nice GUI for editing all the different strokes bindings for all the applications.

I've been playing with the idea of releasing this for years so that people could control all their applications using gestures. I figured that someone probably has done this (though probably not in Lisp, which is a shame).

Are people interested in X-level gestures?

dave