Mouse gesture
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In computing, a mouse gesture is a way of combining computer mouse movements and clicks which the software recognizes as a specific command. Mouse gestures can provide quick access to common functions of a program. They can also be useful for people who have difficulties typing on a keyboard. For example, in a web browser, the user could navigate to the previously viewed page by pressing the right mouse button, moving the mouse briefly to the left, then releasing the button.
The first mouse gesture, the "drag," was introduced by Apple to replace a dedicated "move" button on mice shipped with its Macintosh and Lisa computers. Dragging involves holding down a mouse button while moving the mouse; the software interprets this as an action distinct from separate clicking and moving behaviors. Although this behavior has been adopted in a huge variety of software packages, few other gestures have been as successful. As of 2005, most programs do not support gestures other than the drag operation. Each program that recognizes mouse gestures does so in its own way, sometimes allowing for very short mouse movement distances to be recognized as gestures, and sometimes requiring very precise emulation of a certain movement pattern (e.g. circle). Some implementations allow users to customize these factors.
Some computer and video games have used mouse gestures. For example, in the Myth real-time tactics series, originally created by Bungie Software, players use them to order battlefield units to move in a desired direction. Another game using mouse gestures is Lionhead's Black & White. The game Arx Fatalis uses mouse gestures for drawing runes in the air to cast spells. The demo video suggests that some of Nintendo's Wii games will take advantage of such a system.
The Opera web browser has recognized mouse gestures since version 5.11 (April 2001). Several mouse gesture extensions are also available for the Mozilla Firefox browser, such as the Optimoz Mouse Gestures extension that offer also Rocker gestures performed by pressing one mouse button while holding down the other (this offers two additional commands, usually moving forward/backward). These extensions use almost identical gestures as Opera.
Some tools allow using mouse gestures in any application, such as Sensiva and StrokeIt for Microsoft Windows. KDE includes universal mouse gesture support since version 3.2.
Note that holding down buttons while moving the mouse can be stressful, since the downwards action increases friction for the horizontal motion. An optical mouse would be less susceptible to changes in behavior than a ball mouse with increased friction because the sensor does not rely on mechanical contact to sense movement; a touchpad provides no added friction with all its buttons held down with a thumb. However, it was also argued that muscular tension resulting from holding down buttons could be exploited in user interface design as it gives constant feedback that the user is in a temporary state, or mode (Buxton, 1995).
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Buxton, W. A. (1995). "Chunking and phrasing and the design of human-computer dialogues" in Human-Computer interaction: Toward the Year 2000, R. M. Baecker, J. Grudin, W. A. Buxton, and S. Greenberg, Eds. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, CA, 494-499.
[edit] External links
- Brass adds mouse gestures to any Windows application
- Sensiva is a general mouse gesture solution for Windows systems.
- StrokeIt mouse gesture recognition system for Windows.
- MauSuji is a general mouse gesture solution for Windows systems.
- Documentation of mouse gestures in Maxthon.
- Documentation of mouse gestures in Opera.
- OptiMoz, All-in-One Mouse Gestures and easyGestures add mouse gesture and/or pie menu support to Mozilla Firefox.
- xGestures and CocoaGestures are cross application mouse gesture suites for Macintosh OS X.
- The Gesture Recognition Home Page is the homepage for Gesture Recognition and provides a great deal of further information on human-computer interaction
- SkyOS Mouse Gestures SkyOS draws the mouse gesture onto the desktop in realtime.
- Java Swing Mouse Gestures Open source pure Java library for recognition and processing mouse gestures.
