i have a new toy! i found a program called strokeit which allows you to use in mouse gestures in windows. mouse gestures are basically commands which you give with your mouse; e.g. holding down the right-mouse-button and drawing a w will launch my web browser. if you haven’t tried it, you won’t really understand how useful it is. first, you save time by not having to navigate your menus, secondly you can draw it really quickly without precision and it’ll still work, thirdly it brings back memories of scribbling as a kid. newayz, i came upon it because i figured it would be a good idea to try and hook my winamp controls to mouse gestures so as to quickly switch tracks and such (if you want to do this, you may find the winamp sdk useful). it’s pretty cool now, i can just swipe my mouse around without having to look at the screen if i don’t like what’s playing.

i think that’s a pretty cool application of ideas; mouse gestures first started out awhile back in mozilla for web browsing, but they still could be extended to a lot more things. it just goes to show how ideas are slow to evolve. take for example the web. most sites, corporate or otherwise are similar, they have their navigation to one side, content in the middle, etc. it’s pretty hard to find new, original ideas for layout or even sites (of course, the counter-argument: people want familiar interfaces). you’d think that with all those people online, there’d be more new ideas. newayz, i did come across a few interesting concepts the past few days (ok. this post doesn’t really work because it follows my thoughts backwards. that is, i found these sites, then was thinking how things were unoriginal, then thought of winamp+mouse gestures idea).

the first is a site called oneword., every day, one word is posted and people can comment on the word provided they type up their comment in one minute. it sounds dumb, but at least it provides a medium with different constraints for people rather than just having your normal old discussion forum.

when i was kid, i used to collect cards. i think collecting gives people a sense of uniqueness; they have a distinctive selection of cards from everyone else. well someone has brought that concept online with cards featuring characters from their comic. i think it’s effective because it separates the fans from the casual surfers. you can measure how much of a fan you are by looking at how many of the cards you have. that’s my guess, or maybe it strikes me as a cool idea because i used to collect cards. that comic also has a random comic generator. again, another pretty simple but different idea.

the comic itself seems to have a lot of dark humor, i might have to check back regularly in the future.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: geeky, webgeek