Friday, May 31, 2013

Considering mouse gesture

this is how to open explorer. just trace your way back to close it
When i am lazy, my body just dont have any power left to touch keyboard. so when i found software to recreate keyboard function from mouse gesture, i just feel rejuvenated. I think "wow its great idea", and now i can be as lazy as much as i want. but now come the trouble.
how can I configure it?
There is many mouse gesture software that set us a default move to replace certain keyboard keys.  The softwares also come with many types, from portables,  normal application or add ons.
But, what if we want to make everything from the very beginning? as an example of easystroke, one of mouse gesture software which i use in ubuntu, didnt give me any default move set. In another perspective, it is good since I dont have to learn something, but its not entirely good thing since I have to set the rule. But after a few test and so on, I got confused and have start to list what can I reconsider to make an easy mouse gesture
so here are few things that I consider
  • From simple to advanced. things going different when people who use stylus and another people who use mouse. movement restriction and hardware capability is counted. when the person use stylus, it mean they can make and do font-like gesture more easily than with mouse. but with mouse it doesnt mean people cant do that, it just will be much harder. 
  • Basic movement variation. Actually if you think carefully there are only few basic movement of a pointer. north, south, west, east, northwest, northeast, southwest and southeast, thats all. 8 very easy gesture to recognized by the application. if these gesture get paired with  with each other you now got 8 + 64 combination. a group of three would give you more 8 + 64 + 512. We also have to think about the similarities in these gesture that would decrease of combination. although some application browser have a lot of keyboard shortcut, a pair of gesture would do your job.
  • Meaningfull gesture. It still better to us to not remember it but understand how it made. I will made some comparison below from some software and what I have made.
  • Habit. After all the idea, which I consider now it is the question, does it all really important? I am now only have few mouse gesture on my application. but this gesture do almost the exact same thing on every application and this also train my muscle memory. So, its is just another egg or chicken question, do we have to set good mouse gesture or we can train ourselves for mouse gesture set by another people.
For another reference you can also see wiki article about pointing device gesture.