Sunday, June 27, 2010

New xGestures news, plus getting xGestures to work with Chrome

Okay, time to update this blog!  It's been over a year, which is pretty ridiculous.

First, since I'm sure some people are wondering about this, I am still developing xGestures, though I haven't had time to put really any substantial work into it for the last couple of years of my life.  However, I have recently cut back my hours at my job, and with the extra time one of the things I plan to do is make a new 2.0 release of xGestures with tons of new features.  I won't say when it'll be done, because I haven't started working on it just yet and I don't know how long it'll take.  But I want it to have oft requested features such as diagonal gestures, if not complex gestures in general, as well as more gesture actions, more ability to have gestures apply to specific contexts, and things like that.  I'll be sure to update this blog as work progresses on that.  I might also release another minor update to address some long outstanding bugs, but I'm not sure yet.

Second, an issue a lot of people report to me is that xGestures doesn't work with Google Chrome.  I don't know why it took me this long to figure it out, but turning on the "Window under the start of the gesture determines the application" button in the Options section of the preference pane is what breaks things.  So if you use Chrome, you probably want to turn that feature off.  In whichever new release of xGestures I make, I'll be sure to fix that.

While I'm talking about the "Window under the start of the gesture..." feature, I'll also add that even if you don't use Chrome, you might want to turn that feature off.  It doesn't work very well --- results are inconsistent.  Looking back over how xGestures works I can see that I never really implemented that feature properly, especially since lots of gestures don't actually work if the program they're for is in the background.  I'll try to address that better in xGestures 2.0, at least by making it work consistently somehow.