The Ashes

Marc Englund wrote to us about his recent experiments with mouse gestures and GWT:

SimpleGesture is a GWT (and IT Mill Toolkit) implementation of the mouse gesture recognition method described by Didier Brun at bytearray.org (as I understand it). It allows you to register easy to understand (human readable) gestures, and receive events when these occur. Additionally, SimpleGesture can record new gestures, so that you don’t have to write them by hand.

In this video demo, he’s using a Wii to show it off (this confused me at first, but he’s using the Wii as a mouse and isn’t doing anything with the Wii-specific inputs):

You can also play with a live demo.

SimpleGesture relies on a bit of Flash to do its thing:

I have used the bytearray mouse gesture library for a Flash project before, and I love how simple the method is, and yet it works very well.
The method works by assigning a number depending on which direction the mouse moves in (moving right will produce “0”, moving down will produce “2”, and so on), and comparing the resulting string of numbers to the registered gestures. The gesture with the lowest Levenshtein distance (and below a set threshold), is considered a match.