Power User Monday Tip of the Week

Screw CommandsóStart Gesturing

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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:

1. Up
2. Down
3. Left
4. 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).