The blog has now moved!

Thursday, July 05, 2007

FlyGesture


FlyGesture by Flying Meat Software

I watch a page called "I Use this". It's a site that lists new Mac software, lots of said software is freeware. Most of the stuff that appears there isn't of interest to me, however, once in a while something really cool appears there. That was the case with Fly Gesture.

I saw that it was a mouse gesture program and thought to myself "this could be cool, odds are it's horribly hard to control and results in your quitting all applications by mistake". From my experience, mouse gesture things are not the best way to control your computer, mostly because they're not very easy. However, FlyGesture seems to work nicely. It takes a bit of getting used to, I suggest setting no modifier keys and starting it from a mouse button. There are a load of actions already there that you can edit or remove or add to as you wish.


FlyGesture by Flying Meat Software

With Fly Gesture, you push a key or mouse button (you set which one it is) and the window shown to the left pops up. You connect the dots and it tells you underneath what you will be doing if you click. The window is actually a little larger than that on the left, I shrunk it to look nice on the blog. The disadvantage of a fast computer is that I cannot tell you how good it is on lower end computers. However, as luck would have it, I garnered access to a slower computer (768mhz with 600Mb of Ram, should be slower than most Macs) and it ran fine.

I did have one incident where I was playing warcraft 3 and pushed the middle mouse button by mistake, when Warcraft 3 crashed about 20 minutes later I found that there were yellow lines all over the screen and Fly Gesture sucking up 99% of the CPU power trying to catch up with the mouse (you don't have to push and hold the button, just push it once). I needed to go into Activity Monitor to quit it as it doesn't show up if you Command + Tab your way through the apps (though by default it does show up, I just prefer it not to).

2 comments:

Sammy Davies said...

How is that better than just using a mouse regularly?

Also, are you in church on Sunday? Can you do the words etc? Let me know either way.

sammy_daviesjr@hotmail.com

Teifion said...

Lets suppose I want to play/pause iTunes. Normally iTunes is in hidden mode so I'd have to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen, click the icon to un-hide it, click play/pause and then possibly hide it. I have keyboard shortcuts too but this can be faster (and I've not got keyboard shortcuts for everything).