"My first brush with mouse gestures on the Opera browser was an accident, but the ability to quickly move backward or forward in the browser history, open new windows, close tabs, and more without using the menus or moving the mouse toward the navigation toolbar won me over immediately. Nowadays, this feature is available in Firefox and Konqueror too, and you can even configure mouse gestures for GNOME and KDE desktop environments." More here.
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Member since:2005-07-06
There are however a whole class of apps where you have to use the mouse the whole time anyway. Adding mouse gestures to these kinds of apps might be interesting.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-02-04
While keyboard shortcuts are often nice and fast, if my hand isn't on the keyboard, a mouse gesture would make more sense.
For example if I'm using my Wacom tablet. I'm left handed but use mice right handed so I keep my right hand on the system mouse or the Wacom 'puck' and have the stylus in my right hand. In that situation, I don't want to bother with the keyboard.
Member since:2006-12-15
There is an application launcher for MOSX that uses gestures to bring up an interface that tries to predict which app you want to launch... You get a few choices as to which apps it thinks you're going to want to use and then it gets out of your way.
After demoing it for a little while, I really didn't find the gesture interface very useful and if anything, it cost me more time than simply right clicking on a dock folder to pop up a list of apps.
If I really don't want to leave the keyboard, I can simply appleKey+spacebar and bring up spotlight, type a few letters and launch my app from there. (I'm sure there are similar tricks in both Windows and Linux)
Also if you're working in 10.5 you can get quicklook to function from the cli. Apps like BBEdit and Textwrangler will also install command line tools so that you can launch them to edit files. What's nice about this is that both BBEdit, Textwrangler and Quicklook all convert binary plist files to text.
Anyways, to get back on topic, I think gesture based interfaces may be better left to fingers and not mice, at least in my limited use of them.
Member since:2005-07-06
I was going to comment saying basically the last thing you mentioned, macUser. I could see myself performing gestures on a trackpad, where gestures are not *quite* as abstract as they are with a mouse. Mouse gestures have never worked well for me.
I'm excited about multi-touch products starting to be more common, and I eagerly await greater integration in daily OS usage.
Member since:
2005-09-21
I never really saw the point of mouse gestures. The whole point for me is to minimize the use of the mouse as much as possible, not use it for more and more things. Generally keyboard shortcuts are faster anyway, and I have an easier time remembering them (they're also much more standard across applications).