Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Enabling Mouse Gestures for Cocoa Apps

Posted by pudge on from the i-have-trouble-remembering-my-own-name-sometimes dept.

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."

3 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mixed results by Captain+Pedantic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --

    None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
  2. compatibility issues by harveyswik · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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::

  3. Graphics pad based commercial technology by fbrehm · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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