Friday, September 8, 2023

xGestures 1.9.2

Golly gee whiz! There's a new version of xGestures, version 1.9.2! As always, you can download it here: https://briankendall.net/xGestures/download.htm

This update doesn't add any new features, but it fixes a bunch of important stuff, some of which had been bothering me for years. Why I waited this long to fix these bugs is a mystery to me. I know that people have a way of tolerating and getting used to little bugs and annoyances in apps that they love, and I think I was doing that with xGestures. But then a little while later I had this "lightbulb over the head" moment where I was like, wait a minute, this is my app, why don't I just fix the damn thing?

This version also seems to work just fine in macOS Sonoma, at least according to a friend who's been running the beta for a few months now.

Here are the fixes:

  • Fixed application Exposé in macOS Ventura
  • Perform Keystroke action can now type keystrokes involving the numpad or navigation keys (e.g. arrow keys, home, end, etc.)
  • Fixed bug where sometimes a gesture would get "stuck" down
  • xGestures no longer freezes indefinitely when interacting with apps that have unresponsive UI
  • Fixed rendering bugs when drawing a gesture path
  • Fixed gestures being misdetected due to small movements from certain mice with high refresh rates (e.g. the MX518)
  • Fixed erroneous rocker gesture that could occur after switching away from an app that has gestures disabled

The big one for me is the whole "gestures getting stuck" thing. That was quite annoying, and there was no real rhyme or reason to why it happened. That should be fixed now. The other big one is xGestures becoming unresponsive as it tries to interact with an application that's locked up. That shouldn't really happen any longer either (though xGestures might still lock up for a half second or so before its query to the aforementioned locked up app times out). Overall this seems to make it a lot more pleasant to use. Enjoy!

8 comments:

Ed said...

Thanks so much for continuing to keep xGestures going.

aki said...

This is great, thanks so much for the continuing updates for this amazing utility! Proud to be one of the 'at least five people' still relying intensely on xGestures :)

[BTW the ReadMe.rtf in the DMG for this latest version is still the ReadMe for version 1.9.1, though the in-program documentation itself is the updated one]

Aki

Celeri said...

"Fixed erroneous rocker gesture that could occur after switching away from an app that has gestures disabled"

Brian, I think you just cannot imagine how happy I was while reading this line... =)

Still so glad this tools keeps up making progress along every macOS update, thanks a million!

John Rose said...

You rock so hard. Thank you thank you thank you!

Waseem said...

Fantastic - love this app so much. Thank you for keeping it up to date!

alamont said...

Hi Brian,
Just want to add my appreciation of the continued support for xGestures. I've got it linked to my Wacom stylus and it's become an absolute necessity for my drawing/painting workflow. Do you have a donate/tip button somewhere, I couldn't find it on your site?

Thanks again!

Anonymous said...

When accessing my mac with xgestures running via remote control and click on the system menu bar, the menu always disappears immediately after it appears. Not sure why but it works after quitting xgestures.

It would be perfect if this could be fixed.

Brian Kendall said...

@Anonymous Try going into the xGestures preferences under Options / Advanced and check the box for "Filter events at annotated session level". Then restart xGestures. I'm not sure if it'll fix your issue, but it's worth a try.