SkyOS Gets System-Wide Mouse Gestures

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 14th Sep 2005 11:44 UTC

Support for mouse gesture recognition has been implemented. By using the System Manager "Gesture" plugin you can add, remove and configure your own mouse gestures. Whenever SkyOS recognizes a conigured mouse gesture, the desired action is performed. You can select from many pre-configured actions like: maximize/minimize window, close application, launch application, etc. The entire gesture recognition is fully intergrated into SkyOS/SkyGI as a service application which can easily be enabled/disabled. The obligatory screenshot.

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too lazy to grab the mouse

by Anonymous on Wed 14th Sep 2005 12:03 UTC

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system wide shortcut keys >> system wide mouse gestures for me. the lag generated when switching to and from the keyboard is critical some times. i wonder if there will be a stick mouse (ala thinkpad) on a desktop keyboard.

--
garapheane

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RE: too lazy to grab the mouse

by Anonymous on Thu 15th Sep 2005 05:32 UTC in reply to "too lazy to grab the mouse"

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It's funny. I've wanted something like that myself. I love my thinkpad for exactly the reason you mention, I never have to move my hand from the keyboard.

Whenever I mention to anyone how much I like that over the touchpad people can't believe I'm serious. I love the little eraser head.

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I don't like it

by Anonymous on Wed 14th Sep 2005 12:16 UTC

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I never liked mouse gestures, or things like "levae the pointer in the corner to do this". I like to see the mouse as a simple device: point and click.

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RE: I don't like it

by sappyvcv on Wed 14th Sep 2005 16:21 UTC in reply to "I don't like it"

Member since:
2005-07-06

So what? Don't use them then. Many people will like this.

Seems pretty cool. Since it's built-in, hopefully it offers some advantages to what a third party app can (such as StrokeIt for Windows). Kudos to SkyOS.

Hint hint Microsoft.

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RE: I don't like it

by boily on Wed 14th Sep 2005 22:44 UTC in reply to "I don't like it"

Member since:
2005-06-30

In a GUI, when you do mouse intensive sessions, gestures come in very handy. They're quick, easy to remember and can do many things without bloating the interface.

Personally, I really do love them.

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RE: I don't like it

by Anonymous on Thu 15th Sep 2005 07:24 UTC in reply to "I don't like it"

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I do like them, when working with my tablet. So I vote for renaming them tablet-gestures

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This would be for me

by MacSlow on Wed 14th Sep 2005 12:17 UTC

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2005-09-14

I often catch myself trying firefox's mouse-guestures in other apps to e.g. close/maximize windows or navigate through differnt tabs. It would be a handy addition to Gnome (the DE I use) for me. Making this available as a custom extension to Gnome I would welcome very much.

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Awesome!

by omnivector on Wed 14th Sep 2005 12:26 UTC

Member since:
2005-07-07

Mac has something similar called CocoaGuestures, but it only works on cocoa apps. Still, I've wanted something like this "built" into an OS for years now.

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KDE

by teprrr on Wed 14th Sep 2005 12:33 UTC

Member since:
2005-07-06

This has been available at least since KDE 3.3 (if not 3.2) via KHotkeys. Just wanted to inform if there are KDE users who might not know this already

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RE: KDE

by Mark Williamson on Wed 14th Sep 2005 13:14 UTC in reply to "KDE"

Member since:
2005-07-06

Yes, it's pretty well hidden but it's definitely been there for quite a while. I just wish it would give more visual feedback - e.g. superimpose the shape of the gesture in progress. (Last time I check it didn't do this.)

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RE[2]: KDE

by Kelly Rush on Wed 14th Sep 2005 15:20 UTC in reply to "RE: KDE"

Member since:
2005-06-30

This is a very good idea. I suggested this to Robert, and he is working on implementing it currently. Thanks for the suggestion!

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RE[3]: KDE

by Mark Williamson on Wed 14th Sep 2005 17:39 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: KDE"

Member since:
2005-07-06

Great stuff! Having pervasive use of mouse gestures is a *really* nice expressive feature but it's really helpful to get some visual feedback (I saw this on some Windows 3rd party gesture software a friend had installed).

I'd also like to suggest some sort of popup to tell me what gesture it thinks I meant to activate (or does SkyOS have this already?). This can just be a passive window (translucent, fade away or something similar to make it pretty ;-). With gesture systems in the past I've been unsure if it was "listening" or what it thought I'd asked for.

It's really nice to see an OS integrating powerful, expressive stuff tightly together; it's the way to achieving CLI-like power in a GUI IMHO.

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RE[4]: KDE

by Kelly Rush on Wed 14th Sep 2005 20:02 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: KDE"

Member since:
2005-06-30

This is definitely a good idea. I will pass it along to Robert to consider.

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RE[5]: KDE

by Mark Williamson on Wed 14th Sep 2005 20:04 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: KDE"

Member since:
2005-07-06

Cool, thanks :-) It's nice to get such an amazingly direct path between users and developers - definitely a practice worth keeping.

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RE[6]: KDE

by Darkness on Wed 14th Sep 2005 20:26 UTC in reply to "RE[5]: KDE"

Member since:
2005-08-27

This is one of the reasons why I became a beta tester, you really get the feeling that you can help and that people are listening if you have interesting ideas.

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RE[7]: KDE

by Kelly Rush on Wed 14th Sep 2005 21:18 UTC in reply to "RE[5]: KDE"

Member since:
2005-06-30

Feedback from our users or potential users is our biggest asset.

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re: too lazy to grab the mouse

by kwanbis on Wed 14th Sep 2005 12:33 UTC

Member since:
2005-07-06

you mean the ThinkPlus USB Keyboard with UltraNav?

http://www-131.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?cat...

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Cool thing

by serenity on Wed 14th Sep 2005 13:05 UTC

Member since:
2005-08-19

I'd like to see more of these features in SkyOS. Traditional OSes are so lame in adding features. Robert always does it with a glimpse. This is the way SkyOS will be able to be something special and this is the way SkyOS will prevail!

Go on SkyOS team!

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RE: Cool thing

by Mark Williamson on Wed 14th Sep 2005 13:17 UTC in reply to "Cool thing"

Member since:
2005-07-06

Although I don't use SkyOS (and may never) I'm really impressed by the *framework* it provides. e.g. It has a neat framework for all apps to easily make use of the media playing services, it has the filesystem indexer service, the gesture service, etc. The frameworks seem to be geared towards making it as easy as possible to get all the "cool stuff" in apps with minimum (or no) effort. Whilst these sort of things are available on other platforms (to a varying extent) it's really nice to see them all going into SkyOS right from the start.

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Finger gestures

by Anonymous on Wed 14th Sep 2005 14:01 UTC

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I recently dicovered the awesome "two-fingers" scrolling technique in Powerbooks. Now, that's useful. Mouse gestures are not really better than keyboard shortcuts after all.

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A little offtopic

by tjfriese on Wed 14th Sep 2005 14:18 UTC

Member since:
2005-07-08

The SkyOS GUI really looks like it is showing it's age to me. Everything I've seen coming out of KDE/Windows/OSX looks better than what SkyOS has to offer. The GUI is the one part that has been left to languish on the side of the road while we have seen useful (or maybe useless) innovations like mouse gestures become part of the system. SkyOS needs something to hook people when it finally goes gold. Mouse gestures will not be it.

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RE: A little offtopic

by Darkness on Wed 14th Sep 2005 14:42 UTC in reply to "A little offtopic"

Member since:
2005-08-27

The GUI has barely changed lately. The current look was an enormous improvement compared to SkyOS 4.9 but needs some improvement indeed. Fact is that this is a rather easy update compared to the updates under the hood like mouse gestures. GUI updates will probably be postponed to the final betas or release candidates.

A fancy GUI is useless if what's beneath does not work properly. Eye candy is the finishing touch.

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Awesome!

by Ronald Vos on Wed 14th Sep 2005 14:47 UTC

Member since:
2005-07-06

Stuff like this convinces me SkyOS has what it takes to survive. Mouse gestures are incredibly useful in terms of productivity (less necessity to take your hand of your mouse and move them to the keyboard, or less mouse movement) and to have them system-wide and thus less modal...that's just brilliant.

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UI Contest?

by Lowspirit on Wed 14th Sep 2005 15:07 UTC

Member since:
2005-07-08

Wasn't there a UI contest for this a long time ago, something like "WindUI" won? The man that made that mockup must have been brilliant...

It still uses the popup hint boxes at the bottom and some minor elements of that design though which is kinda cool.

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RE: UI Contest?

by Kelly Rush on Wed 14th Sep 2005 15:08 UTC in reply to "UI Contest?"

Member since:
2005-06-30

Yes, it was a cool design, which was tweaked a bit to fit in with the nuances of SkyOS.

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Please fix the taskbar in SkyOS

by Anonymous on Wed 14th Sep 2005 17:04 UTC

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Its absurd that open programs and control panel like windows show up as a folder icon in the system tray.

This has always stood out to me as not paying enough attention to the details.

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ship it

by Anonymous on Wed 14th Sep 2005 19:03 UTC

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is mouse gestures really that high on the TODO list?
seems there are other, more important things to take care of so this thing can finally ship. tack on the fluff later.

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RE[7]: KDE

by teprrr on Wed 14th Sep 2005 21:02 UTC

Member since:
2005-07-06

A bit offtopic, but that's why I became a developer

You can fix things here and there and implement features you'd like to have and help other's by implementing their feature requests.

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great news!

by JrezIN on Wed 14th Sep 2005 21:51 UTC

Member since:
2005-06-29

Great news! It's always good too see an OS evolving from the user's point of view... =]

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mouse gestures for every X platform

by Anonymous on Thu 15th Sep 2005 05:26 UTC

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i recently released a mouse gestures imlpementation for X. take a look at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xgestures/
you will be hooked.

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RE: This would be for me

by chavo on Thu 15th Sep 2005 05:49 UTC

Member since:
2005-09-15

If you have KDE installed you can use khotkeys, the KDE mouse gesture program. I use KDE now but in the past I have used khotkeys in different desktops.

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blaat

by Anonymous on Thu 15th Sep 2005 12:26 UTC

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Why is everyone so happy with mouse gestures.
First time i heard about it was in opera.
I seemed to did one per accident,
and it started blah blah blah you made a mouse gesture.

Sorry,

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Hrm.

by bryanv on Thu 15th Sep 2005 15:09 UTC

Member since:
2005-08-26

If only I had my BeOS box handy.

This would be insanely easy to implement on BeOS, system-wide.

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