Mouse Gestures Gain Followers 325
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.
And with my track ball? (Score:5, Funny)
Mice are for people with more than 10 cm^2 of desk space
Re:And with my track ball? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:And with my track ball? (Score:2, Insightful)
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:2)
Re:And with my track ball? (Score:4, Funny)
-Ducky
Re:And with my track ball? (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Now if only IBM had given it a more creative name...like Compact Laptop Interface Tool.
Joy Buttons (Score:2, Funny)
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)
here [ao.com]
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.
Re:And with my track ball? (Score:2)
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.
Re:And with my track ball? (Score:3, Funny)
I instinctively took to working the Thinkpad with my tongue
Re:And with my track ball? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Trackballs, mice, pens, gestures and pie menus (Score:2)
I have used both and prefer track balls. Many other folks do also, but most seem to prefer mice.
Mouse gestures were not "introduced in opera" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mouse gestures were not "introduced in opera" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mouse gestures were not "introduced in opera" (Score:4, Funny)
I mean, there has to be a population of people that were introduced to using gestures by trying to get their animals to stop eating their own shit, throw fireballs at enemies, and make rain clouds appear.
So does this mean that I can make a gesture and all my coding work will be complete? Damn, that would be nice.
Re:Mouse gestures were not "introduced in opera" (Score:2)
Re:Mouse gestures were not "introduced in opera" (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Mouse gestures were not "introduced in opera" (Score:2)
Uh, I don't think too many people have used such a system. Opera introduced gestures to the common desktop user. No one is claiming that they invented them.
If I introduce you to my friend Bill, does that mean I gave birth to him? Opera took a great concept that wasn't getting the attention it deserved, and introduced it to a great number of people (including myself).
Re:Mouse gestures were not "introduced in opera" (Score:5, Informative)
"Indeed, mouse gestures have been incorporated
into some advanced 3D CAD (computer-aided design)
programs, but they are now being extended to ordinary
computer tasks."
Re:Mouse gestures were not "introduced in opera" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Mouse gestures were not "introduced in opera" (Score:3, Funny)
Galeon has it too (Score:2, Informative)
Check out the radial context thingie from optimoz (Score:5, Informative)
Much better than gestures, at least for me as a trackball user.
Optimoz PieMenues [mozdev.org].
But your mileage may vary.
Bye egghat.
Re:Check out the radial context thingie from optim (Score:2)
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.)
Re:Check out the radial context thingie from optim (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Check out the radial context thingie from optim (Score:2)
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)
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....
RadialContext tips (Score:2)
the download page. Did you know that you get
extra functions when holding Alt?
Re:Check out the radial context thingie from optim (Score:2)
With a normal right-click style popup menu, you also ten to remember where the option you want is. For instance, if you right-click on a link in IE, the open in new window option is the second one. I could and do do that with out really looking at it or even really thinking about it.
Mouse gestures for other window apps (Score:5, Informative)
They did the same in the game Black And White (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Galeon on the other hand has nice gesture support.
Re:Black and white??? Bluck (Score:2)
Sensiva has changed my life (Score:2, Informative)
Mostly good. (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Re:SENSIVA (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Mostly good. (Score:2)
Re:Mostly good. (Score:2)
Someone in marketing has a sense of humor.
Re:Mostly good. (Score:2)
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. =)
Mod the coward up to the sky :) (Score:2)
Incidentally, their notion of "custumize" is jolly Linuxian, isnt it? A text associative array of keypad keys translated into coordinates. Joe User, keep away, you are not welcome here...
New Gesture Ideas (Score:4, Funny)
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)
Even for web surfing??
Re:Only the keyboard? (Score:2, Insightful)
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?)
Re:Only the keyboard? (Score:2)
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.
Re:Only the keyboard? (Score:3, Informative)
Other than those two, the only other action I perform really frequently is probably "Back", which I have a side button on my mouse for. I realize most people probably don't have a back button on their mouse; I used to use the keyboard for this rather than drag the cursor up to the toolbar. But still... hyperlink clicking and scrolling is like 90% of web surfing to me. I suppose I could use the arrow or page keys for scrolling (and I tend to for long articles), but switching back and forth between mouse and keyboard all the time is a pain.
Mostly the keyboard (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Only the keyboard? (Score:2)
No, but you can get close. IE for Mac lets you type the first few characters of a link to focus the first matching link. Current Mozilla nightlies have a similar feature, but in Mozilla, you can type letters anywhere in the link text. Mozilla gives you more feedback as you use its version of the feature. Mozilla lets you use Ctrl+G to go to the next matching link. Mac IE's version currently works better for pages that use image links, as long as the images have alt text.
I use accesskeys (Alt+S, etc) and type-to-focus for links on my start page [hmc.edu] and type-to-focus for paths I follow frequently from my start page (classes -> bio -> schedule, mozillazine -> talkback, etc). I also use type-to-focus to search through a list of students and phone numbers where the names happen to be links. If I need to open a large number of links at once, I often use a bookmarklet [squarefree.com]: Linked Images for thumbnail links to images, Linked Pages for a list of links to non-image pages. I use the mouse for most other links.
2. Scroll. Since my hand is already on the mouse, the mouse wheel is perfect. Mouse wheels are pretty common these days.
I also use the mouse for scrolling often, even if my hand isn't on the mouse before I want to scroll. Why? It might have something to do with the way the down arrow key only goes one line in Mozilla and the pgdn key goes a little too far. Or maybe I miss "smooth scrolling" from IE. Or maybe it's because in a maximized Mozilla window, there is no space between the scrollbar and the edge of the screen, so it's easier to scroll using the mouse in Mozilla than in IE.
This is not a black and white situation... (Score:2)
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.
Re:This is not a black and white situation... (Score:2)
MOM: Tommy, take out the garbage.
TOMMY: *looks up, down, left, right, left, right* What?
MOM: Tommy what the hell is that- stop making those gestures at me with you eyes.
TOMMY: * looks down, right, around, up, down* What?
MOM: that's it! Go to your room.
and kids will be kicked out of class for using gesturing to communicate secretly behind the teachers backs.
Re:This is not a black and white situation... (Score:2)
Opera had gestures before Black and White was released.
gestures in XP (Score:5, Funny)
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*
StrokeIt (Score:2)
Explorer Supprts Gestures! (Score:4, Funny)
I give it gesture every day...
Reasonable use of gestures (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Reasonable use of gestures (Score:2)
Travis
Re:Reasonable use of gestures (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Reasonable use of gestures (Score:2)
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.
Favorite Mouse Gesture (Score:2, Funny)
...when I give those DRM assholes over at Disney the finger.
Patent it! (Score:2)
The organization could offer someone like, say, Microsoft, a license for $5 billion
The mouse-wheel (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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
taps better (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:Im gonna have to vote no on this one... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Im gonna have to vote no on this one... (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Im gonna have to vote no on this one... (Score:2)
systems. On Windows, the context menu pops up when
you release the button. On Linux the menu appears
when you press it.
So the left button is likely the default one for
Linux.
Opera's Alternate Gesture (Score:2)
oops... (Score:2)
Web Developer II [sst.com]
MultiTouch gestures are even faster! (Score:2, Informative)
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)
My unit was defective, though...
Keyboard binding configuration ability is better (Score:2)
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.
What's wrong with keyboard shortcuts? (Score:2)
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)
Mouse Gestures and radial context menus (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Mouse Gestures and radial context menus (Score:2)
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.
Re:Mouse Gestures and radial context menus (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Mouse gestures==greatest recent interface advance (Score:2)
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)
http://www.tcbnetworks.com/strokeit/ [tcbnetworks.com]
Optimoz gestures rule! Challenge me! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Hand gestures with a webcam (Score:2)
Just think about sticking out your middle finger and have someone mod down as a troll.
Re:I only use hand gestures, thanks (Score:2)
Re:I only use hand gestures, thanks (Score:2)
For me, web browsing is a background task; it's what I do when I'm waiting for a compile to finish, or something simmilar. Because of this, I do most of my web-reading via keyboard; page-up and page-down, primarily, then alt-tabing or ctrl-alt-lefting back to whatever I was doing originally. Still, when it comes to navigation, i.e. clicking a link or traveling through my history, I have to go to the mouse. Gestures would be ideal in this situation, since they can take place anywhere, but you have to mouse over to a menu/button.
Keyboard vs. Mouse vs. Dial Up (Score:2)
OTOH, throw in slow dial up and it doesn't matter what the hell kind of control you have.... you're surfing is limited by the bps of the link rather than your own twitch rate...
Lots of people need gestures! (Score:2)
Other potential markets include users of hand-crank-generator-powered computers (which have one hand tied up at all times) and computer users too dense to manage a keyboard.
Re:Lots of people need gestures! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:sounds like a great Idea - (Score:2, Informative)
Re:i should use this.... why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, this all depends on having simple mouse-gestures for the most used features. Opera's "back" and "forward" mouse gestures are so intuitive that it very quickly becomes a pain to use browsers that don't have the ability.
And yet... (Score:2)
OTOH, I broke my own rule and wired 2 of the 5 buttons on my mouse to fwd and back and use them to flip through web contexts. And Good Lord do I miss the scrollwheel when I don't have it or an app doesn't support it.
Pray tell (Score:4, Insightful)
"Introduce" != "Invent." Sure, lots of CAD/CAM/CAE tools had gestures forever ago, but how many regular users run those programs daily?
Opera "introduced gestures" to the web browsing world.
Re:Pray tell (Score:2, Insightful)
The word "introduce" gives a sense of possessiveness to the thing being introduced. That may be unintentional, but that's the way many people view the word.
Alternative Input (Score:2, Informative)
What if we had the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to links on a web page?
Let me explain my reasoning and then what I am talking about. Our company is in the process of converting its HP3000 database to Oracle and its terminal applications to web applications. One of the drawbacks to switching from a terminal application such as Reflections is we lose all of the custom shortcuts that people use to navigate through the system.
As an example, a web application has a row of navigation across the top that stays the same throughout. We could say that any link that matches this description from this URI: domain.com/ or domain.com/app/module maps to Ctrl-F3 or Ctrl-Alt-F.
Let's take it a step further and say that we can add shortcuts to not just links, but form elements as well. We can already tab to form elements, but this would make the process that much faster.
Not only would this be an absolute hit with people that hate taking they hands off the keyboard, but I believe that whatever browser would implement this would make great inroads into corporations that are converting their terminal applications to web based applications.
Re:Alternative Input (Score:2)
http://labs.google.com/keys/index.html [google.com]
Re:huh? (Score:2)
So, to select text to copy / paste, do it the same way you always have.
Re:huh? (Score:3)
I don't use Opera. So if I need to hold a mouse button and move my mouse,then how in the heck would I select text for cut-n-paste?
I do use Opera, and to go back, you hold down the right mouse button and drag left. (The section you quote does not make that clear.) Alternatively -- and this is better for trackball users -- you could hold down the right mouse button and click the left button once to go back. Essentially, Opera takes advantage of relatively easy but unused mouse motions to implement gestures. You can still select text for cut'n'paste, and right-click to access context-sensitive menus.
The gestural back and forward is great for web browsing. I find it much faster than the keyboard, since when I'm browsing, I almost always have my hand on or near my mouse, but I'm not always poised and ready to type. (Plus I type slow.)
Personally, I'd like gestures to be more configurable. I think Opera's gone a little overboard on creating some of these, so occasionally, I end up doing something like closing a window when I really wanted to open a new one. I'd like to be able to selectively disable the gestures I don't use -- presently, it's all or nothing. (At least in the version I'm using anyway.)
Re:geek snobbishness (Score:3, Insightful)
But you're right I would certainly call 50 year old ladies named "Nancy" super geeks, because they prefer clicking keys rather than a mouse. Go away now.
Re:geek snobbishness (Score:2)
I read somewhere (no link, sorry) that using a keyboard for shortcuts and stuff only SEEMS faster, but isn't. You also have to consider the type of application. For an old-school word perfect secretary, they are typing pretty much nonstop and keyboard shortcuts are right there where their hands are. For someone browsing the internet, they have one hand on the mouse most of the time and are clicking links, so it is faster to keep that hand there and do motions rather than moving the hand to the keyboard and then doing motions.
Re:Optimoz and security (Score:2)
You can just change the permissions on the chrome directory and all is solved... all users are able to install the program and have it work.
laziness (Score:3)
as for learning equally confusing gestures... is moving the mouse back to go back confusing? or forward to go forward? what about tracing the letter 'b' for bookmark? now, some of them aren't intuitive (moving up to open a new tab), but how freakin hard is it to learn 'up'? the zig-zab movement to close a window isn't intuitive but it's fun to just shake the mouse violently to close a window you want to get rid of.
I've been using gestures with tabbed browsing for a month or so and it's definitely faster for me. I even mouse and gesture left handed just fine (I'm right handed and usually mouse with my right, but after awhile my wrist and shoulder like a break so I switch). If a righty can gesture and browse efficiently with his left hand, I would say this works pretty well.