Enabling Mouse Gestures for Cocoa Apps

Buhaina writes "One Gerd Knops has released version 1.0 of his Cocoa Gestures software, enabling Cocoa applications to use mouse gestures for activating common commands. This is very similar to the OptiMoz project for Mozilla and can be activated on a per-application basis."

Comments

Re:Mixed results

[Captain Pedantic]

To be honest, you probably only want them on a per app basis.

For example, Up Down would obviously be "Next Image" in an image viewer, but wouldn't necessarily mean anything else in another app.

compatibility issues

[harveyswik]

Unlike Mozilla this requires a modifier to turn the Gesture engine making it difficult to accidentally Quit/Go Back/Restart, etc. Unfortunately, I can't get it to recognise my Intellimouse even with all features turned off. Now, if I have to reach for the keyboard it's not much use is it? That's what I was attempting to avoid in the first place.

Last Gripe: It only has four recognised movements - up, down, left, right. It would be *much* more usefull if it could tell the difference between say left-down-right-up and a circle starting at pi/4 or between left-down and a diagonal slice up and to the right at an angle of 45+/-10 degrees.

Then again, it's *free* and it's easy to learn. ::shrugs::

Graphics pad based commercial technology

[fbrehm]

The bitart consulting page says "It is unclear where the notion of gestures first appeared. Most sources mention them in combination with experimental pie menu implementation in the 1970s."

My first introduction to a technology like this was in the commercial Applicon CAD system used by some people I used to work with in the mid 70's. The system was introduced by Applicon in the early 70's.

If you do a google search for "applicon command pattern recognition" the first couple of articles are interesting. "The operator would sketch a symbol on a tablet, such as a square, and the system would interpret this to mean that it should zoom into the selected area on the CRT screen." It used a graphics pad instead of a mouse and ran on a PDP-11/45!

I downloaded the Mouse Gestures software. Let's see if it is the equal of that 30-year old stuff! :-)

Fred

Re:no thanks

[penguin_punk]

habit. I had no idea I did so many awkward gestures with my hands while reading web pages [instert persian kitty joke here], but after installing mouse gestures for Mozilla, my subconscious twitching became very apparent to me. It's just not what I wanted. I am aware that I could have changed my modifierkey, etc. but it wasn't worth it. I find that with an optical mouse (with a scroll button), I can navigate fast enough that I didn't require mouse gestures to provide me with shortcuts.

If you like and use gestures, then kudos, but it was just plain awkward. albeit it will get easier after I use it for a while and don't have to think about moving the mouse in a certain way, I'm fine the way I am right now.

Sincerely,

Me.