David
Hayward tries his hand at mouse gestures, and recalls that art was never his
strong point
Features at
a glance
·
Training mode
·
Customise your own gestures
·
Tons of added options
· Uses only 250-500KB RAM
Image taken from the StrokesPlus
site, because our attempt looked like a three year old had done it
It came
to me while testing StrokesPlus that we often find
ourselves taking shortcuts to make our technical lives
easier, whether that’s simply tapping
the screen to bring up our emails,
or via voice
recognition, where shouting, ‘Google’, at your smartphone
several times will hopefully fire up a web
browser.
This is
an area where the PC has been dormant
for some time. Although attempts have been
made in the past to create an almost Star Trek-like system for PC task
automation, they more often than not, failed miserably.
However, the future of PC command automation
may be just around the corner; a new star
is on the horizon and it’s
called StrokesPlus. It’s a mouse-driven gesture recognition application that will allow you
to automate repetitive tasks by simply
drawing a symbol or letter on
the screen.
StrokesPlus can be downloaded from bit.ly/y0fupm, with version 1.7.2 being the latest edition (at the time of writing)
for both the 32- and 64-bit variants. Being only something
in the region of 1.5MB, the
program shouldn’t take long to download, after which it’s
a simple case of double-clicking the MSI to initiate the installer. Once installed, it sits quietly
in the system tray, waiting patiently for one of
the default gestures to be drawn on the screen
via the initial right mouse button
set up.
The actions menu contains a lengthy list of
defaults, which can be altered and tweaked, plus the ability to create new
gestures and actions for use in different applications
Right-clicking the icon in the system tray will bring
up a menu containing a wealth of options, from
choosing the drawing button (right mouse
button by default, but can be middle button, or any combo
of keys), to creating an ignore list, listing the current actions, changing the preferences and disabling the software. Within the preferences you have the option of changing the colour, the width and the opacity of the draw gesture,
alongside some experimental options that include memory
management of the application and playing a sound if the gesture is unrecognised.
The actions menu
contains a lengthy list of defaults,
which can be altered and tweaked, plus
the ability to create new gestures and
actions for use in different applications. Once up and running,
you’ll be drawing away on your
desktop like its second nature.
Or so you’d think.
Unfortunately this
is where StrokesPlus falls apart. In essence, drawing an ‘e’ on the screen may sound perfectly fine to launch Explorer, but after the third attempt to get the gesture working, and the poor quality
of the ‘e’ being drawn (admittedly, using the mouse to draw with was
never my forte), it would
instead have been much quicker
launching Explorer from the
start menu. The same goes for
drawing a ‘c’, which closes an application; surely clicking on the ‘X’ in the corner would be quicker? But perseverance is the key here,
and after a while you begin
to see the benefits.
In short, it can be a difficult recognition
system, but if you can get quickly aquainted with, it
is quite convenient.
In short, it
can be a difficult recognition
system to get to grips with and
at first it does seem
to take longer to draw a gesture than it does to do the action normally. It can also be difficult drawing symbols well enough
for them to be recognised. However, if you take
the time to practise the mouse gestures, drop into the settings
and simplify the movements, then you’ll soon be opening, closing, launching new tabs within
your browser, kicking off new
Word documents and shutting the system down without ever
having to bother with those pesky
three little icons in the top corner of the window,
or having to ever touch the Windows Start button again.
