Slashdot Mirror
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.
So how is this going to work with my track ball?
:-)
Mice are for people with more than 10 cm^2 of desk space
The only good weather is bad weather.
I have used a CAD/CAM package called Applicon Bravo (now owned by unilogic) for many years that used mouse and tablet gestures since it ran on a VAX 11/780, through newer VAX and now PC systems. It uses the middle mouse button to indicate that you are "gesturing" and you can make multi-level menu selections with gestures.
Great Galeon has gestures for a while now
God, how I love this.
Much better than gestures, at least for me as a trackball user.
Optimoz PieMenues.
But your mileage may vary.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
For mouse gestures in all your favorite window programs try 'stroke it' (heh, nice name). Link included... http://www.tcbnetworks.com/strokeit/forum/
The idea of waving the mouse about the screen to do things is good, if done right. But I don't see it as any major innovation, just something thats handy at times.
There is also the problem of having the 'gestures' easy to remember, and how do you document what counts as a gesture, how acurate does it need to be. - Maybe it will take off in many applications, but, its not likely to change the way we work or anything is it?
I saw the light at the end of the tunnel... But it was just someone with a flashlight bringing more work.
I didn't think that gestures was all that great when they first came out. But after getting used to using them for web browsing, I wanted more for every application. Since then I've used Sensiva, and even tho I only use a few like minimize and new, I find that I am now handicapped when I use machines that don't have mouse gestures. Its so slow and cumbersome. Don't get me wrong, the keyboard is great for a lot of things, but I still find myself using the mouse, and a lot of the gestures can be done without moving my hands back and forth.
I thought this sounded like some nifty gee-whiz crappy feature when I first heard about it, but after trying it in Opera I was quite impressed. It quickly became a normal browsing habit.
The only problem was that on occasion I would accidently make the gesture for "close window" and my pages would magically disappear.
It'd be ultra-nifty if there was a mouse gesture training app, so I could map commands to custom gestures. Then I could bind the movement made when I throw my mouse at my monitor to Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.
I think they should implement gestures similar to those in Black & White.
Drawing out something resembling an ancient religious symbol to go back a page would be interesting. I've been looking for a way to push my carpal-tunnel to its limits.
"Personally, I almost solely use the keyboard as input device"
Even for web surfing??
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
..although it's got to be the first time a feature from a game has made it to a web browser ;)
I guess the next stage in development will be to hook up eye-movement sensors for control of a UI, altho thats bound to cause some nasty and new forms of RSI.
I don't think my computer wants to know what gestures I make at it when Windows XP curls up and dies. The good thing is that it reboots into Linux by default, so....
Combine this with one of those infrared finger mice, and you can feel like a Jedi: "This isn't the page you're looking for, go back." *waves hand to the left*
...
It can actually be significantly faster, given that much of the web is point-click oriented so your hand is probably already on your mouse. (Unless you're too cool for mice and use lynx, of course.)
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.
Sensiva does all that. You can program the gestures to input text. Nothing is cooler than having multiple term windows open, and cleanly logging out with just a slash.
Does anyone else think "StrokeIt" is a really bad name for a product?
I second that. I used the normal gestures at first, but after I got this installed I've used gesturing a lot more.
For those not in the know it's a circular menu interface, like in Neverwinter Nights. It works the same as gestures, but it has icons and text to make it easy to learn new gestures. (Which is the biggest problem with the standard gestures IMHO.)
I give it gesture every day...
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I tried pie menus for about 3 weeks, and they are terrible. The first thing is that the pie menu that moves around is incredible laggy. Second, it's hard to know what the pictures mean, while it's easy to right click, and find what you're looking for in a text menu. Pie menus could be optimal if you want to spend months memorizing exact movements to get where you want, but a lot of people don't have the patience.
I use Opera gestures - and love them. But they don't make sense for all applications. The problem is a dsicontinuity when you switch between keyboard and mouse - either way. Editing, and most programming operations, is fundamentally a keyboard based operation, and hot keys are far more sensible than mouse gestures for this. But for me, browsing the web is a mouse-based operation. I have to point to links to follow them, so my hand is on the mouse. I have a wheelmouse, so scrolling is also under my fingers. The only gestures I use regularly are back and forward, and they have become so automatic I use them (uselessly0 wherever the model applies - i.e. in all "browser" type applications, such as Konqueror or Windows Explorer.
One thing we want to do is to try and get people to standardise. It will be a *real* pain if one piece of software used a gesture for minimise and another for quit.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
...when I give those DRM assholes over at Disney the finger.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
As has been mentioned above.. when navigating the web, one hand is likely already on the mouse. The gestures quickly become second nature, more-so I'd say than the appropriate keyboard press, and require less concentration than using the mouse to find the appropriate button on the top tool-bar. (Plus allow full control while in full-screen mode, without requiring a context shift from keyboard to mouse.)
Of course, this all depends on having simple mouse-gestures for the most used features. Opera's "back" and "forward" mouse gestures are so intuitive that it very quickly becomes a pain to use browsers that don't have the ability.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
I also thought that an (hopefully non-profit) organiztion should start patenting things like this, under an "open source" patent. That is, your code can use it for free, but only if you release your code. If you choose not to release the code, you have to license the patent from the organization (and this is how the organization makes enough money to patent all the crazy new ideas its members have). All this just to be a prick and stick it to the companies that use their patents as weapons of evil...
:). Oh wait, I said non-profit.
The organization could offer someone like, say, Microsoft, a license for $5 billion
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
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.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Mouse gestures are the best thing for masturbators since baby oil/lotion/vaseline/
Use the right hand for navigating and the left hand for.. err you know...
At least this is what I heard. It isn't like I do it or anything.
My Mom caught me watching a movie once starring the famous Russian actor Kotcha Jackinoff
I have been thinking about this. there was a discussion about this a while back here on slashdot talking about the gesturing as seen in minority report.
it was stated by myself and others that the gestures that good 'ol tom was using were too exagerated and that nobody would want to use such large flailing movements to navigate through files, video etc...
it seems to me that the most efficient way to "gesture" your way through information would be more along the lines of morse code.
I would much rather just ahve a touch sensitive mouse pad (better than the touch pads we see today on laptops etc) and you would tap in certain patterns to acheive what you want.
this could also be placed on the tops of keys on the keyboard.
what if you tapped out "J J J" (not hard enough to depress the J key - but enough to register the tap on the sensor on the J key... this action would then do whatever you assigned it to.
the other option is chording buttons on the mouse.
I have the MS intellimouse which I love. the two thumb buttons are assigned to forward and back and I cant stand it when i use a mouse without these functions.
If you were to add more buttons to the mouse - you could then chord certain actions.
I am just very dexteritous with my fingers - and using them in tapping and chording formations just makes more sense to me based on my particular preference.
I am comming towards the end of my moz experience (check my other posts on that) and one of the first things I did was load up optimoz and added mouse gestures since it was so highly raved about.
:
My experience was ugh to bad. The first big problem I had was copying text from webpages. For some reason, moz always thought I was gesturing. Well, no. Then, outside of that accidental gesture, I found myself making them a lot more, including the close gesture. Then, when I really wanted to make one, it never worked right
For back and forward, I have my intelimouse explorer. For scrolling I have a wheel, but the no autoscroll bug in Moz is kinda anoying. If mouse anything needs to be added, that is it. Anything else I can do w/ quick menus, like opening a new tab. Years of FPS mean I can quickly move my mouse and click w/ deadly acuracy.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
The best mouse gesture I've seen in Opera would not work under the current development of MozGest. To go back under Opera, first right-click, then quickly left click, like you are tapping your fingers on a desk. Go the other way for forward. Hard to explain, but very useful. It just feels right. There is no dragging involved.
-twb
"Introduce" != "Invent." Sure, lots of CAD/CAM/CAE tools had gestures forever ago, but how many regular users run those programs daily?
Opera "introduced gestures" to the web browsing world.
What if we had the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to links on a web page?
Let me explain my reasoning and then what I am talking about. Our company is in the process of converting its HP3000 database to Oracle and its terminal applications to web applications. One of the drawbacks to switching from a terminal application such as Reflections is we lose all of the custom shortcuts that people use to navigate through the system.
As an example, a web application has a row of navigation across the top that stays the same throughout. We could say that any link that matches this description from this URI: domain.com/ or domain.com/app/module maps to Ctrl-F3 or Ctrl-Alt-F.
Let's take it a step further and say that we can add shortcuts to not just links, but form elements as well. We can already tab to form elements, but this would make the process that much faster.
Not only would this be an absolute hit with people that hate taking they hands off the keyboard, but I believe that whatever browser would implement this would make great inroads into corporations that are converting their terminal applications to web based applications.
1;
So, to select text to copy / paste, do it the same way you always have.
i just gave my boss a gesture and now i'm looking for a new job. what do you think of this one? its in the bay area so i wouldn't have to move!
Web Developer II
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Hmmm,
for me they aren't laggy.
And I think learning pie menues is easier than gestures cause you have visual feedback. Wait 1 second and it shows you what the icons mean.
Therefore I don't need months to memorize them. I just need 4 or five (next/previous tab and reload to name the three most important).
Of course one can argue, that the normal right click text menu is enough. Perhaps I'm just happy, cause the pie menues give me exactly those functions that are missing (for me) in the normal right-click-text-menu.
As I've said before: YMMV.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Ah, but you have to use both hands to browse the web -- they only need one. The initial target market for this is compulsive masturbaters. If penetration is deep enough, they expect to move to one-handed Vietnam veterans and people trying to make good on "I could do that with one hand behind my back" bar bets.
Other potential markets include users of hand-crank-generator-powered computers (which have one hand tied up at all times) and computer users too dense to manage a keyboard.
May we never see th
And let it teach him/her how much mojo can get wasted by writting informative comments while not logged...
:)
Incidentally, their notion of "custumize" is jolly Linuxian, isnt it? A text associative array of keypad keys translated into coordinates. Joe User, keep away, you are not welcome here...
Sorry all you mouse gesture devotees out there, multi-finger gestures on a touch surface are even better than mouse gestures 'cause you don't have to draw a whole symbol!
With multi-touch gestures, the finger combination and direction of motion at the beginning of the slide immediately determine the command. See:
http://www.fingerworks.com/gesture_demo.html
Plus you can mix them in with typing and pointing as well, all in the same space!
I don't use Opera. So if I need to hold a mouse button and move my mouse,then how in the heck would I select text for cut-n-paste?
I do use Opera, and to go back, you hold down the right mouse button and drag left. (The section you quote does not make that clear.) Alternatively -- and this is better for trackball users -- you could hold down the right mouse button and click the left button once to go back. Essentially, Opera takes advantage of relatively easy but unused mouse motions to implement gestures. You can still select text for cut'n'paste, and right-click to access context-sensitive menus.
The gestural back and forward is great for web browsing. I find it much faster than the keyboard, since when I'm browsing, I almost always have my hand on or near my mouse, but I'm not always poised and ready to type. (Plus I type slow.)
Personally, I'd like gestures to be more configurable. I think Opera's gone a little overboard on creating some of these, so occasionally, I end up doing something like closing a window when I really wanted to open a new one. I'd like to be able to selectively disable the gestures I don't use -- presently, it's all or nothing. (At least in the version I'm using anyway.)
I can spell. I just can't type.
When I'm surfing, I tend to visit text-heavy pages, so I do a lot of scrolling. I use the mouse to click on a link and then I get it out of the way. I use the arrow keys on the keyboard to scroll through the page and to go back. My hand gets cramped up when I hold a mouse for long, and this works for me. Besides, it keeps me in practice for those occasions when I still use lynx to browse.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
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.
... It's true, the Super Nintendo had basic support for gestures. It's documented in the manual: "Starting the Game, 1.) flip off the power switch..."
My unit was defective, though...
...though I've nothing personally, religiously, or otherwise against mouse gestures, I personally have no interest in using them. I try to keep my hands as far away from the mouse as possible, while still within a graphical environment, and making the computer even more dependent on the mouse just isn't going to swing me.
What I really wish more people would do is allow for greater user configuration of keyboard shortcuts. I'm not talking about a macro tool like the old Tempo II Plus for the old MacOS (which my father still runs on his MacOS 9 partition and is very very sorry to see go away in 10). I'm talking about being able to rebind any command to whatever key combination you want, within the OS, like rebinding keys under Q3. I don't see why this stuff has to be hard coded all the damn time. I remember MS Word used to let you (if I recall correctly) but the last time I used Word often enough to need to worry about changing the keybindings was a very long time ago, and I don't know if the feature is still there.
I haven't found many pieces of software aside from game software that lets you do it. Default configurations are fine, but I want to be able to reassign useful key combinations that are assigned to commands I'll never use, to ones I will, without having to edit the source code to do it.
Why introduce another risk?
Mouse use is already a risk for persons: RSI. Making more movements with the mouse, with gestures, I feel that this is heading a road we don't wanna go.
Use the keyboard and love your hands/wrists for a long time.
many CAD/EDA type software packages have had mouse gestures for a while. i know mentor graphics has had some extremely useful gestures since i started using it.
All circuits busy.
1) Hold down the right mouse button. I can't stress this enough. Don't click once, then move the mouse, then click again.
2) Use the tooltips.
3) Don't feel you need to use the pie menu for everything, just a few things like switching tabs, refreshing a page etc is good. Keep doing it, and after a few times you'll find it comes naturally.
4) Throw the mouse around. If you're wondering why the pie menus follow you around, it's so you can be very vicious with them. Hold down right, throw the mouse to the top left, the throw it to the right and let go. You can do this very quickly, because you don't have to aim, and the movements can be very vague indeed. Then let go.
5) Don't think about it. If you constantly look at the menu while using it, you lose the speed advantage. If anything, just defocus for a moment while you start, that way you remember the motion rather than what's on the screen.
To be honest after getting used to them, I love them. I wish GTK/Qt had an option to do this. It's one of those cool hacks you want to do but never have time for....
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.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
However, people get far, far quicker at using them when they remember *which direction* the option they want is in, whereas for a normal pop-up menu you'll always need to look at it.
With a normal right-click style popup menu, you also ten to remember where the option you want is. For instance, if you right-click on a link in IE, the open in new window option is the second one. I could and do do that with out really looking at it or even really thinking about it.
Gads get a life. That fact it the using the keyboard in general is quicker than using a mouse. Ask any old-school word perfect secretary how much they like using the shortcuts instead having to use a mouse.
But you're right I would certainly call 50 year old ladies named "Nancy" super geeks, because they prefer clicking keys rather than a mouse. Go away now.
This is also mentioned in the tips section of
the download page. Did you know that you get
extra functions when holding Alt?
Please, can't you Window Manager coders hack something together so that I could use my mouse gestures on ALL the windows? You can't imagine how many times I click-r-l-r on a window and get momentarily puzzled when I notice it's not closing.
Mouse gestures make so much damn sense that I want to spit on all the so-called "user interface experts" who don't see them as the absolute #1 priority for general implementation. As far as I'm concerned, those guys are frauds. Mouse gestures should have been in everything for a decade now.
After using it for a couple months... I couldn't possibly live without it.
http://www.tcbnetworks.com/strokeit/
That's true, but I think there are probably a lot of people out there who only use one hand for the mouse and use the other hand for keyboard shortcuts...
For me, web browsing is a background task; it's what I do when I'm waiting for a compile to finish, or something simmilar. Because of this, I do most of my web-reading via keyboard; page-up and page-down, primarily, then alt-tabing or ctrl-alt-lefting back to whatever I was doing originally. Still, when it comes to navigation, i.e. clicking a link or traveling through my history, I have to go to the mouse. Gestures would be ideal in this situation, since they can take place anywhere, but you have to mouse over to a menu/button.
Thomas Galvin
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.
that is not true...
You can just change the permissions on the chrome directory and all is solved... all users are able to install the program and have it work.
IANAL, but I play one on
I'm not so sure about that...
I read somewhere (no link, sorry) that using a keyboard for shortcuts and stuff only SEEMS faster, but isn't. You also have to consider the type of application. For an old-school word perfect secretary, they are typing pretty much nonstop and keyboard shortcuts are right there where their hands are. For someone browsing the internet, they have one hand on the mouse most of the time and are clicking links, so it is faster to keep that hand there and do motions rather than moving the hand to the keyboard and then doing motions.
IANAL, but I play one on
I saw a prototype thinkpad he made with TWO Joy Buttons, one for each hand, positioned just like nipples! I think it would have sold very well -- it was certainly very appealing!
-Don
ConnectedTV turns a Palm handheld into your personal TV guide and remote
yes, this is definitely for people that are lazy. I am too lazy to move my hand off my mouse after I just clicked a link to hit ctrl+- or backspace or whatever. Since my hand is already on the mouse for almost all of required web browsing, it is faster (and less effort intensive) to just keep it there.
as for learning equally confusing gestures... is moving the mouse back to go back confusing? or forward to go forward? what about tracing the letter 'b' for bookmark? now, some of them aren't intuitive (moving up to open a new tab), but how freakin hard is it to learn 'up'? the zig-zab movement to close a window isn't intuitive but it's fun to just shake the mouse violently to close a window you want to get rid of.
I've been using gestures with tabbed browsing for a month or so and it's definitely faster for me. I even mouse and gesture left handed just fine (I'm right handed and usually mouse with my right, but after awhile my wrist and shoulder like a break so I switch). If a righty can gesture and browse efficiently with his left hand, I would say this works pretty well.
IANAL, but I play one on
Was some while ago, but on the PC I think B&W still recorded the gesture through the autosave, which means that when you trained your reflexes to not stop the movement when saving occured, it worked out alright.
Would it be possible to use hand gestures through a web cam? That would be easier and more fun than using a mouse.
Just think about sticking out your middle finger and have someone mod down as a troll.
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
Looks like 2.5 is also freeware. Download it here
Like so many human characteristics, I suspect that individual differences affect the relative merits of track-balls vs. mice.
I have used both and prefer track balls. Many other folks do also, but most seem to prefer mice.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Keyboard shortcuts versus Mouse Gestures... both have their strong points. Good browsers (Opera comes to mind) should support both.
:)
OTOH, throw in slow dial up and it doesn't matter what the hell kind of control you have.... you're surfing is limited by the bps of the link rather than your own twitch rate...
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I use Opera, but I don't use gestures for precisely that very reason - I don't like to train myself into using something I won't have available on all my workspaces.
OTOH, I broke my own rule and wired 2 of the 5 buttons on my mouse to fwd and back and use them to flip through web contexts. And Good Lord do I miss the scrollwheel when I don't have it or an app doesn't support it.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
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
I implemented gestures for BeOS on a system-wide level, you can get the GPL'd software here:
http://www.bebits.com/app/2281
It is based on libstroke which can be easily used in any applications.
Actually, my armchair rationalization is also informed by my experience of some years as a consultant to the military in the human factors area. One thing I learned is how much BS is published in the field.
The paper may indeed show that the next time I am marking pie menus, I may want to use a mouse. Of course, this is assuming the research is valid and replicable, and more important - applies to me - a specific individual with specific physical and mental characteristics, which is my point. Humans are variable.
Regardless of what the research shows for the specific subjects selected to do the specific task in the research, the Kensington Expert Mouse trackball that I use works better, for this individual human, doing what this particular human does with a pointing device, than a mouse does.
If I want to sign my name on the screen, I'll use a mouse. If I want to use a pie menu, maybe I'll use a mouse for that.
I rarely do either!
The only good weather is bad weather.
most of the linux desktops have this incoroprated, and its one of the reasons I stick with KDE, is for this very feature. Its not limitless, but its an excellent start.
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
You persist in missing the point.
Has it ever occurred to you that a paper on properly done research may not be applicable to every possible situation? That there are not only variations in situation, but also in individuals?
I don't have to read Bill Buxton's paper to know that track balls work better for me, for what I do. After all, I am quite capable of carrying out the experiment myself, and have done so.
For you to continue arguing, you will find yourself in the position of asserting that a mouse is better than a trackball for my situation, since that is what I have been talking about. Somehow I doubt that you really would like to assert that.
There was nothing in his paper that addressed my particular situation. It is utterly irrelevant that a mouse is superior to a trackball for the tested circumstances, isn't it?
The only good weather is bad weather.