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Mouse Gestures Gain Followers 325

Posted by timothy from the user-interface-decisions dept.
StefMeister writes "According to this article at ZDNet, the use of the mouse using 'mouse gestures' (as introduced in Opera) is gaining a lot of followers. Personally, I almost solely use the keyboard as input device, but it might be interesting for others. Although changing the way people are accustomed to working is always tricky." I certainly enjoy gestures in Mozilla, thanks to OptiMoz.
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Mouse Gestures Gain Followers More

Mouse Gestures Gain Followers

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  • And with my track ball? (Score:5, Funny)

    by mesocyclone ( 80188 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:23PM (#4374620) Homepage Journal
    So how is this going to work with my track ball?

    Mice are for people with more than 10 cm^2 of desk space :-)
    • I use gestures just fine in Opera with my track ball.

      Especially the best ones: right-left click (back in history), left-right click (forward in history)

      But the other ones (close window, etc.) also work, sometimes I have to repeat once or twice, though I think "Ctrl-W" is the best gesture for that.
      • After having a non-active KVM switch (and browsing in W2K w/Opera)for far too long. I got really good with keyboard shortcuts for most things. Turn switch, lose mouse ... Now that I have an active switch I still use most of the shortcuts. I find them faster than using the mouse for most things.

        My favorites in Opera: Ctrl-F4/Ctrl-W (closes window), Ctrl-N opens new window, 1 cycle backwards through windows, 2 cycle forwards through windows -- even with a scrollpoint I still prefer to page down or arrow key through the open window. Shift-click (open in new window), Ctrl-Shift-Click (open in new window in background). Alt-Tab (brings up list of all open pages and can cycle through them). Ctrl-Shift-W (Close all windows).

        I played around with the gestures for a day or so, but never really got used to it. I appreciate the thought, but developers serve me better by making lots of keyboard shortcuts for various task and having some standization in them.

    • Re:And with my track ball? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Ducky ( 10802 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:32PM (#4374721) Homepage
      Actually, I could comfortably use gestures with an IBM Thinkpad's pencil eraser nub for a pointing device. Well, "comfortably" might be too positive a word... perhaps "without the desire to go gouge my eyes out," was was the case when trying to play quake with the infernal thing.

      -Ducky

      • Re:And with my track ball? (Score:5, Funny)

        by zulux ( 112259 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:58PM (#4374986) Homepage Journal
        gestures with an IBM Thinkpad's pencil eraser nub

        My girfried has benifited from all the training I've gotten with my Thinkpad.

        Thanks IBM!

        (Now if only I could get her to use the Thrustmaster correctly...)

        • Re:And with my track ball? (Score:5, Funny)

          by crapulent ( 598941 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @02:06PM (#4375064)
          My girfried has benifited from all the training I've gotten with my Thinkpad

          Now if only IBM had given it a more creative name...like Compact Laptop Interface Tool.
          • Ted Selker, the guy who invented and developed the trackpoint for IBM, originally called it the "Joy Button". But IBM was just too conservative to call it that.

            I saw a prototype thinkpad he made with TWO Joy Buttons, one for each hand, positioned just like nipples! I think it would have sold very well -- it was certainly very appealing!

            -Don

        • Re:And with my track ball? (Score:5, Funny)

          by zulux ( 112259 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @02:18PM (#4375167) Homepage Journal
          IBM is also famous for their "Mouse Ball" feild note:

          here [ao.com]

          ..a sample of the note:
          Mouse balls are not usually static sensitive, however, excessive handling can result in sudden discharge. Upon completion of ball replacement, the mouse may be used immediately.

          It is recommended that each servicer have a pair of balls for maintaining optimum customer satisfaction,and that any customer missing his balls should suspect local personnel of removing these necessary functional items.

          • That actually becomes even more funny when partly translated to Swedish, where the word for mouse, "mus" is actually also a word for vagina.

            Don't ask me who thought that was a good name though...

            And well, before you ask, I haven't heard of "vagina balls" either. :)
        • I'm kind of the other way around.
          I instinctively took to working the Thinkpad with my tongue
    • So how is this going to work with my track ball?

      Actually, quite well. I actually use the radial context menus on Mozilla set to only activate when the right mouse button is dragged. Essentially, this allows for "normal" operation in most cases, and mouse gesture operation with right dragging (plus I get a little reminder gui if I don't remember what gesture to do).

      I use a Microsoft optical trackball (the one with the thumb ball) and I've migrated almost exclusively to mouse gestures and it works great. One nice thing is that the length of the strokes of the gesture don't matter, so you can spin the trackball and use a larger gesture or just one small stroke and you get the same response.

  • Mouse gestures were not "introduced in opera" (Score:4, Informative)

    by sys$manager ( 25156 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:25PM (#4374634)
    I have used a CAD/CAM package called Applicon Bravo (now owned by unilogic) for many years that used mouse and tablet gestures since it ran on a VAX 11/780, through newer VAX and now PC systems. It uses the middle mouse button to indicate that you are "gesturing" and you can make multi-level menu selections with gestures.

  • Galeon has it too (Score:2, Informative)

    by fundflow ( 87625 )
    Great Galeon has gestures for a while now

  • Check out the radial context thingie from optimoz (Score:5, Informative)

    by egghat ( 73643 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:26PM (#4374650) Homepage
    God, how I love this.

    Much better than gestures, at least for me as a trackball user.

    Optimoz PieMenues [mozdev.org].

    But your mileage may vary.

    Bye egghat.
    • I second that. I used the normal gestures at first, but after I got this installed I've used gesturing a lot more.

      For those not in the know it's a circular menu interface, like in Neverwinter Nights. It works the same as gestures, but it has icons and text to make it easy to learn new gestures. (Which is the biggest problem with the standard gestures IMHO.)
    • I tried pie menus for about 3 weeks, and they are terrible. The first thing is that the pie menu that moves around is incredible laggy. Second, it's hard to know what the pictures mean, while it's easy to right click, and find what you're looking for in a text menu. Pie menus could be optimal if you want to spend months memorizing exact movements to get where you want, but a lot of people don't have the patience.
      • Hmmm,

        for me they aren't laggy.

        And I think learning pie menues is easier than gestures cause you have visual feedback. Wait 1 second and it shows you what the icons mean.

        Therefore I don't need months to memorize them. I just need 4 or five (next/previous tab and reload to name the three most important).

        Of course one can argue, that the normal right click text menu is enough. Perhaps I'm just happy, cause the pie menues give me exactly those functions that are missing (for me) in the normal right-click-text-menu.

        As I've said before: YMMV.

        Bye egghat.

      • Re:Check out the radial context thingie from optim (Score:5, Informative)

        by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @03:03PM (#4375530)
        Not at all, that's what I thought until I realised I wasn't using them properly. A quick guide to the Mozilla pie menus:

        1) Hold down the right mouse button. I can't stress this enough. Don't click once, then move the mouse, then click again.

        2) Use the tooltips.

        3) Don't feel you need to use the pie menu for everything, just a few things like switching tabs, refreshing a page etc is good. Keep doing it, and after a few times you'll find it comes naturally.

        4) Throw the mouse around. If you're wondering why the pie menus follow you around, it's so you can be very vicious with them. Hold down right, throw the mouse to the top left, the throw it to the right and let go. You can do this very quickly, because you don't have to aim, and the movements can be very vague indeed. Then let go.

        5) Don't think about it. If you constantly look at the menu while using it, you lose the speed advantage. If anything, just defocus for a moment while you start, that way you remember the motion rather than what's on the screen.

        To be honest after getting used to them, I love them. I wish GTK/Qt had an option to do this. It's one of those cool hacks you want to do but never have time for....

  • Mouse gestures for other window apps (Score:5, Informative)

    by shakey_deal ( 602291 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:26PM (#4374652)
    For mouse gestures in all your favorite window programs try 'stroke it' (heh, nice name). Link included... http://www.tcbnetworks.com/strokeit/forum/

  • They did the same in the game Black And White (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ClickNMix ( 218488 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:27PM (#4374654) Homepage
    The idea of waving the mouse about the screen to do things is good, if done right. But I don't see it as any major innovation, just something thats handy at times.

    There is also the problem of having the 'gestures' easy to remember, and how do you document what counts as a gesture, how acurate does it need to be. - Maybe it will take off in many applications, but, its not likely to change the way we work or anything is it?

    • Black and white??? Bluck (Score:3, Interesting)

      by victim ( 30647 )
      So your playing B&W, you are half way through a gesture to create water on your poor people and the game decides to autosave, freezing input in the middle of the gesture. So you try to recover and complete the gesture or at least make it do something sane, but no. You get a fireball or something and incinerate your people. Bad god. Maybe the PC version of BW is better, but the Mac version could inspire one to injure the programmers.

      Galeon on the other hand has nice gesture support.

      • Was some while ago, but on the PC I think B&W still recorded the gesture through the autosave, which means that when you trained your reflexes to not stop the movement when saving occured, it worked out alright.

  • I didn't think that gestures was all that great when they first came out. But after getting used to using them for web browsing, I wanted more for every application. Since then I've used Sensiva [sensiva.com], and even tho I only use a few like minimize and new, I find that I am now handicapped when I use machines that don't have mouse gestures. Its so slow and cumbersome. Don't get me wrong, the keyboard is great for a lot of things, but I still find myself using the mouse, and a lot of the gestures can be done without moving my hands back and forth.

  • Mostly good. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Raskolnk ( 26414 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:27PM (#4374662)
    I thought this sounded like some nifty gee-whiz crappy feature when I first heard about it, but after trying it in Opera I was quite impressed. It quickly became a normal browsing habit.

    The only problem was that on occasion I would accidently make the gesture for "close window" and my pages would magically disappear.

    It'd be ultra-nifty if there was a mouse gesture training app, so I could map commands to custom gestures. Then I could bind the movement made when I throw my mouse at my monitor to Ctrl-Alt-Del.

    • Re:Mostly good. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Ultra Magnus ( 312814 )
      Sensiva [sensiva.com]. It has a linux port (what more could you ask) but it is trainable. While the newest versions cost money, the earlier versions like 1.07 are free and have all the functionality. You can prolly find some of them roaming around the internet still.
    • I use StrokeIt [tcbnetworks.com] for Win32, customized for individual applications. It's quite versatile.
    • Probably -1 Redundant, but I haven't read much...

      I would love to see mouse gestures implemented at the library level. I don't know what level it'd be best to implement it at in Linux (I don't know enough about the relation between X, desktop and WM), but I would *LOVE* to have a close window gesture for all my programs.

      It's great that options are coming out so it's easier and easier to use one form of input for most of your actions while working with and given program. When I'm in word processing, keyboard shortcuts are the best. When I'm surfing in Galeon, mouse gestures rock the house. =)

  • New Gesture Ideas (Score:4, Funny)

    by SmlFreshwaterBuffalo ( 608664 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:28PM (#4374675)
    I think they should implement gestures similar to those in Black & White.

    Drawing out something resembling an ancient religious symbol to go back a page would be interesting. I've been looking for a way to push my carpal-tunnel to its limits.

  • Only the keyboard? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Wraithlyn ( 133796 )
    "Personally, I almost solely use the keyboard as input device"

    Even for web surfing??
    • Personally, I almost solely use the keyboard as input device
      Even for web surfing??

      Is it so shocking? I often use Links [sourceforge.net], w3m [sourceforge.net], or even the old standby Lynx [browser.org] for browsing. These fine console browsers have almost no mouse support and are plenty usable.

      All of the major browsers support full navigation with the keyboard, and I use them frequently. (Galeon [sourceforge.net] even supports vi-like keybindings, bringing me endless glee.)

      For various reasons it sometimes makes sense to keep your fingers on your keyboard. If I'm in the middle of hard core coding, it's faster to Alt+Tab to Galeon to reference something, scroll down the page, and chase a link than it is to grab the mouse. Grabbing the mouse can break my concentration, my zone, when deeply engaged in code. For skilled users who are familiar with the system, a keyboard can be a significant speed win, even when referencing something on the web.

      (Yes, yes, yes, the all knowing Tognazzini has told you that the mouse is always faster. Unfortunately Tog has only shown this for novice or adequately skilled users. He doesn't seem interested in studying heavy duty users. If I'm going to be using a piece of software for eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks per year, perhaps it makes some sense to investigate an interface that keeps your hands on a keyboard. I was particularlly struck by the importanance of this while checking into a convention several years ago. Each attendee gave several pieces of information to a staff member which the staff member entered into a form on screen. After each piece of information, each staff member would cast about for their mouse, slowly navigate to the next entry, click, then slowly reset their hands on the home row. Repeat this for 10,000 attendees and you have some serious time wasted. Teen years ago every one of those staff members would have been familiar with using Tab to switch between fields and would have been able to enter information limited by their typing speed. Wow, this parenthetical comment really got off track, huh?)

      • Dude, you're preaching to the converted. I'm also a code monkey. I've been messing with computers since before they even USED mice. I use keyboard shortcuts and bindings all the time.

        ALL I am saying, is that selecting hyperlinks, that is, picking arbitrary points on a 2D surface, seems ideally suited to the mouse.

        These new type-ahead find features on IE for Mac or Mozilla 1.2a look interesting, but come on, one's on a Mac, and one's in a non-mainstream alpha, hardly ubiquitous just yet.
  • ..although it's got to be the first time a feature from a game has made it to a web browser ;)
    I guess the next stage in development will be to hook up eye-movement sensors for control of a UI, altho thats bound to cause some nasty and new forms of RSI.

  • gestures in XP (Score:5, Funny)

    by cybermace5 ( 446439 ) <g.ryan@macetech.com> on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:31PM (#4374714) Homepage Journal
    I don't think my computer wants to know what gestures I make at it when Windows XP curls up and dies. The good thing is that it reboots into Linux by default, so....

    Combine this with one of those infrared finger mice, and you can feel like a Jedi: "This isn't the page you're looking for, go back." *waves hand to the left*
  • Does anyone else think "StrokeIt" is a really bad name for a product?

  • Explorer Supprts Gestures! (Score:4, Funny)

    by zulux ( 112259 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:35PM (#4374760) Homepage Journal


    I give it gesture every day...

  • Reasonable use of gestures (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AlecC ( 512609 ) <aleccawley@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:38PM (#4374794)
    I use Opera gestures - and love them. But they don't make sense for all applications. The problem is a dsicontinuity when you switch between keyboard and mouse - either way. Editing, and most programming operations, is fundamentally a keyboard based operation, and hot keys are far more sensible than mouse gestures for this. But for me, browsing the web is a mouse-based operation. I have to point to links to follow them, so my hand is on the mouse. I have a wheelmouse, so scrolling is also under my fingers. The only gestures I use regularly are back and forward, and they have become so automatic I use them (uselessly0 wherever the model applies - i.e. in all "browser" type applications, such as Konqueror or Windows Explorer.

    One thing we want to do is to try and get people to standardise. It will be a *real* pain if one piece of software used a gesture for minimise and another for quit.
    • Exactly, I have no use for gestures because I have a wheel, a forward mouse button, and a back mouse button. Mouse3 and Mouse4 also work in explorer for going forward and back. Maybe these are a good idea for people button-impaired, but it's sure easier to just click a button then to have to remember a gesture to go forward or back.

      Travis

    • Re:Reasonable use of gestures (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wbattestilli ( 218782 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @02:28PM (#4375253)
      I agree with this and would like to make a second point.

      I work for Alias|Wavefront. We make Maya. It has a fantastically efficient and powerful UI that is based around gestures. To see people working with Maya, who use it professionally, is quite amazing. I also have to say that it has a very steep learning curve and is way beyond what you can expect from Joe User.

      For gestures to work efficiently, there can be no visual feedback while executing the command. If there is visible feedback, your interface is basically reduced to multidirectional menues. Maya can be used this way but it is no better than using the standard pulldown menues.

      I love gestures in Galeon/Opera/Mozilla, but I think that they should be left to the power user and that they should be used sparingly in applications.
    • One thing we want to do is to try and get people to standardise. It will be a *real* pain if one piece of software used a gesture for minimise and another for quit.

      But Microsoft would never embrace, extend, and corrupt a standard. I'm sure that if IE ever includes gestures, then Opera gestures will work perfectly.

      Damn it, I love classical music, and you can pry my Opera from my cold, dead hands.


  • ...when I give those DRM assholes over at Disney the finger.
  • I also thought that an (hopefully non-profit) organiztion should start patenting things like this, under an "open source" patent. That is, your code can use it for free, but only if you release your code. If you choose not to release the code, you have to license the patent from the organization (and this is how the organization makes enough money to patent all the crazy new ideas its members have). All this just to be a prick and stick it to the companies that use their patents as weapons of evil...

    The organization could offer someone like, say, Microsoft, a license for $5 billion :). Oh wait, I said non-profit.

  • The mouse-wheel (Score:4, Interesting)

    by garoush ( 111257 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:44PM (#4374845) Homepage
    After the buttons on a mouse, I find the mouse-wheel to be the most attractive and useful feature. Just think how much you save yourself by using the wheel to scroll up/down in your application and keep the arrow focused on the screen not to mention, using one finger.

    You can take away all mouse-gestures and I won't complain, but I will get mad as hell if you give me a mouse without a wheel.

  • Mouse Gestures.....Masturbators rejoice! (Score:3, Funny)

    by i_want_you_to_throw_ ( 559379 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:44PM (#4374849) Journal
    Mouse gestures are the best thing for masturbators since baby oil/lotion/vaseline/

    Use the right hand for navigating and the left hand for.. err you know...

    At least this is what I heard. It isn't like I do it or anything.

    My Mom caught me watching a movie once starring the famous Russian actor Kotcha Jackinoff
  • I have been thinking about this. there was a discussion about this a while back here on slashdot talking about the gesturing as seen in minority report.

    it was stated by myself and others that the gestures that good 'ol tom was using were too exagerated and that nobody would want to use such large flailing movements to navigate through files, video etc...

    it seems to me that the most efficient way to "gesture" your way through information would be more along the lines of morse code.

    I would much rather just ahve a touch sensitive mouse pad (better than the touch pads we see today on laptops etc) and you would tap in certain patterns to acheive what you want.

    this could also be placed on the tops of keys on the keyboard.

    what if you tapped out "J J J" (not hard enough to depress the J key - but enough to register the tap on the sensor on the J key... this action would then do whatever you assigned it to.

    the other option is chording buttons on the mouse.

    I have the MS intellimouse which I love. the two thumb buttons are assigned to forward and back and I cant stand it when i use a mouse without these functions.

    If you were to add more buttons to the mouse - you could then chord certain actions.

    I am just very dexteritous with my fingers - and using them in tapping and chording formations just makes more sense to me based on my particular preference.

  • Im gonna have to vote no on this one... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rosewood ( 99925 ) <<ur.tahc> <ta> <doowesor>> on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @01:46PM (#4374873) Homepage Journal
    I am comming towards the end of my moz experience (check my other posts on that) and one of the first things I did was load up optimoz and added mouse gestures since it was so highly raved about.

    My experience was ugh to bad. The first big problem I had was copying text from webpages. For some reason, moz always thought I was gesturing. Well, no. Then, outside of that accidental gesture, I found myself making them a lot more, including the close gesture. Then, when I really wanted to make one, it never worked right :

    For back and forward, I have my intelimouse explorer. For scrolling I have a wheel, but the no autoscroll bug in Moz is kinda anoying. If mouse anything needs to be added, that is it. Anything else I can do w/ quick menus, like opening a new tab. Years of FPS mean I can quickly move my mouse and click w/ deadly acuracy.
    • Actually, to stop any problems with copy-and-paste, you can go into Mozilla's Preferences, Advanced, Mouse Gestures, and change the default mouse button to the right mouse button (or middle / wheel, but I'm without one of those here at work). Since I've switched buttons, I've had no problems at all, even with right clicking for any reason.
    • My experience was ugh to bad. The first big problem I had was copying text from webpages. For some reason, moz always thought I was gesturing. Well, no.

      Nice troll?

      Seriously, I don't know what planet you're on, but for me, mouse gesturing only happens when I click the RIGHT mouse button. I select text with the LEFT mouse button. I scroll with the MIDDLE button. I'm surprised you don't complain about getting the "context pop-up menu" when you try to select text as well.

      The situation you're describing has (literally) NEVER happened to me and I've been using mouse-gesturing/pie-menus for a few months now.

      -Michael

  • The best mouse gesture I've seen in Opera would not work under the current development of MozGest. To go back under Opera, first right-click, then quickly left click, like you are tapping your fingers on a desk. Go the other way for forward. Hard to explain, but very useful. It just feels right. There is no dragging involved.
  • i just gave my boss a gesture and now i'm looking for a new job. what do you think of this one? its in the bay area so i wouldn't have to move!

    Web Developer II [sst.com]
  • Sorry all you mouse gesture devotees out there, multi-finger gestures on a touch surface are even better than mouse gestures 'cause you don't have to draw a whole symbol!

    With multi-touch gestures, the finger combination and direction of motion at the beginning of the slide immediately determine the command. See:

    http://www.fingerworks.com/gesture_demo.html [fingerworks.com]

    Plus you can mix them in with typing and pointing as well, all in the same space!

  • SNES supported gestures... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @02:22PM (#4375215)
    ... It's true, the Super Nintendo had basic support for gestures. It's documented in the manual: "Starting the Game, 1.) flip off the power switch..."

    My unit was defective, though...
  • ...though I've nothing personally, religiously, or otherwise against mouse gestures, I personally have no interest in using them. I try to keep my hands as far away from the mouse as possible, while still within a graphical environment, and making the computer even more dependent on the mouse just isn't going to swing me.

    What I really wish more people would do is allow for greater user configuration of keyboard shortcuts. I'm not talking about a macro tool like the old Tempo II Plus for the old MacOS (which my father still runs on his MacOS 9 partition and is very very sorry to see go away in 10). I'm talking about being able to rebind any command to whatever key combination you want, within the OS, like rebinding keys under Q3. I don't see why this stuff has to be hard coded all the damn time. I remember MS Word used to let you (if I recall correctly) but the last time I used Word often enough to need to worry about changing the keybindings was a very long time ago, and I don't know if the feature is still there.

    I haven't found many pieces of software aside from game software that lets you do it. Default configurations are fine, but I want to be able to reassign useful key combinations that are assigned to commands I'll never use, to ones I will, without having to edit the source code to do it.
  • Why introduce another risk?

    Mouse use is already a risk for persons: RSI. Making more movements with the mouse, with gestures, I feel that this is heading a road we don't wanna go.

    Use the keyboard and love your hands/wrists for a long time.

  • mentor graphics (Score:3, Informative)

    by kirn_malinus ( 159763 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @02:48PM (#4375420) Homepage
    many CAD/EDA type software packages have had mouse gestures for a while. i know mentor graphics has had some extremely useful gestures since i started using it.
  • Though radial context menus are supposed to be faster than mouse gestures, I disagree for one simple reason :

    You need to click twice - once to start the radial menu, and once more to confirm your choice. Also the fact that the menu moves with the mouse is a tad dis-orienting when you're trying to learn them (compared to this, mouse gestures have a much smaller learning curve).

    I've tried both for quite some time now and gestures definitely win. Ofcourse, that's because I'm using a mouse.

    I could definitely see trackball users getting a lot of good use out of radial context menus.

    Anyway, both these features go a LONG way in bringing converts into the mozilla camp and that's a good thing for Open Source.
    • Radial menus are not supposed to be faster than
      mouse gestures. But they are faster than linear
      menus. They also offer a better learning curve
      because you can see the available options.

      Oh - and RadialContext is actually supposed to
      be used like a mouse gesture. It's the very
      reason the menu follows the mouse. Simply try
      to hold the button down and drag.
    • The idea of radial context menus is they are self-documenting. You can start by looking at the menu, and then after a while the ones you use become second nature. You don't even really have to "learn" them, as opposed to gestures, which, while obviously not so difficult, still have to be looked up somewhere until you get used to them.

      And if there's a rarely used gesture, it's utterly useless. In a radial menu, you can at least wait for the menu to show up and then follow its cues.

      If a radial menu is well-designed, it becomes pretty similar to a set of gestures. Unfortunately the Mozilla radial menus use tiny hard-to-read icons and so are much too slow to actually use. But in other systems with text menus, they're quite fast to use and learn.

      -- Tristero
  • You know, Mozilla's implementation of mouse gestures are so incredibly useful, that every computer I use which doesn't have them seems hopelessly crippled.

    Please, can't you Window Manager coders hack something together so that I could use my mouse gestures on ALL the windows? You can't imagine how many times I click-r-l-r on a window and get momentarily puzzled when I notice it's not closing.

    Mouse gestures make so much damn sense that I want to spit on all the so-called "user interface experts" who don't see them as the absolute #1 priority for general implementation. As far as I'm concerned, those guys are frauds. Mouse gestures should have been in everything for a decade now.

  • StrokeIt (Score:2, Informative)

    by Durk ( 16765 )
    After using it for a couple months... I couldn't possibly live without it.

    http://www.tcbnetworks.com/strokeit/ [tcbnetworks.com]
  • If you configure the mozilla gestures to best suit you, they can make you more productive than just using shortcut key combinations I think. I would like to see a challenge between my setup with optimoz gestures and someone solely using their keyboard or any other mechanism (radial menus, etc). I seriously think gestures (when configured correctly) can be quicker than most anything.

    The configuration can is key. It should be suited to what you as a user can do most efficiently. I have the left mouse button mapped to do the gesturing because that's where my finger naturally rests and I'm quicker with the left button than the right button (don't know why.)

    Left and right gestures are mapped to back and forward in the browser history. I have the intellimouse with the back and forward buttons, but I honestly find that the gestures are faster. Just make a quick, slight milisecond movement and you go back a page. Sweet. When I use a browser without gestures and I am actually forced to move my mouse up to click the Back button, I now get so frustrated because it feels like going back to 56k after getting used to a T1.

    I have UP mapped to open a new tab, and DOWN mapped to close tab. I like this a lot because I'm always opening up new tabs. With just a quick flick, I have a new window open. And I can quickly close down any tab when I'm done looking at it, and I'm right back at the previous tab. All this without having to move my mouse location.

    That's what I love most about gestures is that I can keep my mouse cursor at it's original location; I don't have to move it to close a tab or open a tab. I don't even have to have my hand on the keyboard.

    Another important key is to keep the gestures short. None of this Right-Down-Up-Left stuff. I like clean, simple, one-or-two direction gestures. I have all my oft-used functions as short gestures. Reload (Down-Up). Add bookmard (Down-Right)...

    Here is my favorite optimized gesture experience. I gesture up once - a new tab is opened. I gesture Left-Right, and Google opens in the new tag. That is, I have Left-Right mapped to go to my home page. So with 3 quick movements I can have google open in a new tab window. That's pretty damn cool.

    In closing, my mozilla browsing experience has certainly skyrocketed after I discovered gestures. I would seriously like to see a Mozilla Browsing Efficiency Challenge (MBEC). I think the person armed with the right gestures would be a serious contender.
  • Would it be possible to use hand gestures through a web cam? That would be easier and more fun than using a mouse.

    Just think about sticking out your middle finger and have someone mod down as a troll.

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