http://www.osnews.com/story/11854/SkyOS_Gets_System-Wide_Mouse_Gestures Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:12:57 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread?30933 http://www.osnews.com/thread?30933 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.

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garapheane Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?30941 http://www.osnews.com/thread?30941 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?30942 http://www.osnews.com/thread?30942 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (MacSlow) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?30945 http://www.osnews.com/thread?30945 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (omnivector) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?30948 http://www.osnews.com/thread?30948 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 Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (teprrr) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?30949 http://www.osnews.com/thread?30949 you mean the ThinkPlus USB Keyboard with UltraNav?

http://www-131.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?cat... Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kwanbis) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?30957 http://www.osnews.com/thread?30957 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! Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (serenity) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?30960 http://www.osnews.com/thread?30960 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.) Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Mark Williamson) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?30963 http://www.osnews.com/thread?30963 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Mark Williamson) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?30976 http://www.osnews.com/thread?30976 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?30988 http://www.osnews.com/thread?30988 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tjfriese) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?30999 http://www.osnews.com/thread?30999 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Darkness) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31000 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31000 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Ronald Vos) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31011 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31011 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Lowspirit) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31012 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31012 Yes, it was a cool design, which was tweaked a bit to fit in with the nuances of SkyOS. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kelly Rush) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31014 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31014 This is a very good idea. I suggested this to Robert, and he is working on implementing it currently. Thanks for the suggestion! Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kelly Rush) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31038 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31038 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 16:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sappyvcv) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31059 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31059 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 17:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31078 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31078 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 17:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Mark Williamson) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31137 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31137 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 19:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31196 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31196 This is definitely a good idea. I will pass it along to Robert to consider. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kelly Rush) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31200 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31200 Cool, thanks :-) It's nice to get such an amazingly direct path between users and developers - definitely a practice worth keeping. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Mark Williamson) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31217 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31217 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Darkness) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31232 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31232 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (teprrr) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31242 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31242 Feedback from our users or potential users is our biggest asset. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kelly Rush) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31271 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31271 Great news! It's always good too see an OS evolving from the user's point of view... =] Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (JrezIN) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31294 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31294 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. Wed, 14 Sep 2005 22:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (boily) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31449 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31449 i recently released a mouse gestures imlpementation for X. take a look at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xgestures/
you will be hooked. Thu, 15 Sep 2005 05:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31451 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31451 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. Thu, 15 Sep 2005 05:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31456 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31456 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. Thu, 15 Sep 2005 05:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (chavo) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31489 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31489 I do like them, when working with my tablet. So I vote for renaming them tablet-gestures Thu, 15 Sep 2005 07:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31551 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31551 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, Thu, 15 Sep 2005 12:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?31671 http://www.osnews.com/thread?31671 If only I had my BeOS box handy.

This would be insanely easy to implement on BeOS, system-wide. Thu, 15 Sep 2005 15:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (bryanv) Comments