How FlyGesture Works.

The idea behind mouse gestures is very simple, but makes for a very powerful and elegant solution for performing specific actions on your computer. The way it works is you usually hit a modifier key (like F1 with gesture), and then draw on the screen with your mouse. The symbol that is made by your movements is mapped to a specific action (or actions) that will be then performed. Actions like "Create a new document", or "Start a new mail message", or "Close window".

FlyGesture does all this and more. FlyGesture provides "guides" on screen for you to move your mouse through and gives instant feedback to you so you know if you are on the right track to performing an action. When the guides you are moving through are blue, it means you are going down a good path to a gesture. When the guides turn red, that means that FlyGesture no longer knows of any actions to perform based on the gesture you are creating. Along with just giving feedback in the form of colors, when you come to the end of a path, the name of the gesture is displayed below the guides.

Here's an example- let's say we want to invoke the "Hide All" gesture

The first thing to do is invoke FlyGesture by press and holding F1. FlyGesture automatically draws all the guides around your current mouse position, meaning you always start your gesture from the middle. Now, move your mouse to the guide right below your current position as shown in the picture above. Notice how the words "Page Down" appear below the guides- this indicates that if you were to release F1, the "Page Down" action would be invoked. But don't do that- let's keep on moving our mouse.

Now move your mouse to the right as shown in the image above. The display now says "Hide All", and if we release F1 FlyGesture will tell all the running applications to "hide".

Piece of cake. Try looking through the FlyGesture catalog (opened by choosing "Open Catalog" from the menubar), and seeing what other gestures you can learn. You can even add your own.