14 DAY TRIAL // Mice are an integral part of the computer experience these days, and perhaps, one day, mice gestures will be too. It's not that far fetched, after all, back in the day, many people used only keyboards as the mouse was not really necessary, nor actually supported by many applications. Many of those keyboard people had a hard time adjusting to the mouse, and much in the same way, many people are still less than 100% sold on mouse gesture, to say the least. I, am one of those people, ever since I had first heard about mouse gestures I have seen their potential, but, to this date, I have yet to see them used as an integral part of my computing experience.
So many ways to skin a cat? One of the big problems I have with mouse gestures is that there is no clear standard. Each implementation of the concept is different, and for each mouse gesture program you use, there are small differences that make or break the gesture. This does little to help the concept at large, after all, imagine if the letter K on your keyboard sometimes typed a L or a J. It would really be annoying, to say the least, and a key is so much less open to interpretation than a mouse gesture.
Some time ago I reviewed another mouse gesture program called FlyGesture; that program had the advantage of great visual feedback, but the detail with which it could work with made it very hard to reproduce the same gesture. The program I am looking at today is quite the opposite, in that it gives absolutely no visual feedback on the gesture. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages so let's see what xGestures is all about.
Behind the scenes Because of the way that mouse gestures are handled by xGestures, and because it offers no visual feedback, everything takes place backstage. This is a double-edged blade. For one thing, it is hard to see the gesture and that means that people who are first approaching mouse gestures will feel it is harder because you are practically working blind. On the other hand, this makes it much easier to get a feel for the gesture, since you are not looking at anything, and your brain does not switch into the "this is drawing" state.
At the end of the day, if you can stick with it for half an hour or so, the gestures start to happen rather naturally.
Level of detail xGestures is a little rough when it comes to the detail of the gestures you can use it for. Any gesture gets broken into a combination of Up, Down, Left and Right, and the mouse has to travel quite a distance for any of the directions to come up. This means that any movement other than the horizontal and vertical ones are very open to interpretation. Diagonal lines are not very well received by the program and often, it will not tell the difference between a Up-Down line and a arrow pointing up, which it will interpret as either Up-Down, or any combination of Up-Right-Down or Right-Up-Down or even Right-Up-Right-Down.
As you can see, there is a lot of room for error, however, if you limit the gestures to horizontal and vertical movements, you will get good results.
One of the biggest advantages of this implementation is that the length of the gesture is rarely taken into account? if you had a Left-Right-Left gesture, it wouldn't matter if you made the gesture moving from one edge of the screen, or only moving it over an area as wide as the Spotlight search bar.
Better than the average bear? xGestures does not handle complicated gestures well, however, the level of freedom that it gives you when performing simple gestures makes it by far more approachable than anything else I have seen.
On the post gesture side of gestures, it does have one trick up its sleeve. Beside letting you define universal gestures that will work in all applications the same, and application specific gestures, that are limited to only one application, it also has support for dialogue windows. This lets you use it to gesture instead of clicking on the three buttons and is useful when dealing with multiple dialogues.
A gesture can be assigned to pretty much any action, from keystrokes to "common commands" which include changing the iTunes track, Expose, and minimize/hide functions. It is even smart enough to hide the window the gesture was made into and not any of the others.
The Good Makes it easy to get the feel of mouse gestures and actually start easing them. This is because it does not offer visual feed back and so appeals to the body's feel for movement.
The Bad It is unreliable when it comes to complex, complicated mouse gestures. This would make it less attractive to mouse gesture veterans who want more and more complexity and a different gesture for everything.
The Truth Mouse gestures are like riding a bicycle, you can't put it in words... Sure you can try, but you can never convey the relevant information, so try it for yourself to see how it is? all I can say is that this program will stay on my computer even after I am done with this review.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
