Apr 27 2009
Screw CommandsóStart Gesturing
By: Jon Gales
Key-commands are great. I love ‘em. Why shall we dump them? Meet Cocoa
Gestures.
It’s a freeware application that lets you use the movement of your mouse as
a command. I know that sounds insanely hard but it’s not. There are only a
few movements you need to know:
- Up
- Down
- Left
- Right
Yep, it’s just the X/Y deal that you did in Algebra (that’s all mice can do
if you had not realized by now). What Cocoa Gestures does is take combinations
of
said
movements
and
remembers them
specific
to
applications.
Example:
Left, Down, Right with your mouse looks like this on your screen:
You don’t have to have rigid lines and sharp cornersórough works. It’s pretty
easy to set each gesture up, you just go to the application menu, select Cocoa
Gestures and click the add button. After you input the actual mouse movement
it shows you what it saw in the form of single letters (u,d,l and r). There
are a lot of combinations of the 4 movements and since they are application
specific you won’t have to worry about running out.
As with everything, there are a few problems. The major one with this app
is that it only works with Cocoa apps. You’ll notice that a lot of your apps
happen to be Carbon…
Even
the
Finder
isn’t
Cocoaóit
was written in Power Plant (according to my programmer friends). How do you
tell if it’s a Cocoa app? Go to the Application menu (next to the Apple Menu)
and see if Cocoa Gestures is there. If not, you’ll have to keep up the key
commands.
Also, if you don’t have a mouse that has two buttons or a scroll wheel then
part of the usefulness of this application is lost. For instance, when I’m
browsing pages in Camino I can just hit the scroll wheel, drag to the left
and view the tab to the left of the page I’m viewing. Quite handy and very
geek chic. On the other hand, if I was using an Apple mouse I would have to
hit a key on the keyboard to tell Cocoa Gestures to start watching the mouse.
If you’re a true power user, you’ll have a two button mouse any way… This
shouldn’t be a problem.
If you use Cocoa Gestures and have some killer tips for everyone, please send
them in. If they really kick butt, I’ll post them and give you credit (if you
want it).
