Blog:: Craig Pringle

If you have used a Tablet PC in slate mode for any length of time you may well have thought to yourself “I wish I could use a gesture to do X”.  For some time now I have been using Mathon as my main browser because it has basic gesture support (in addition to tabbed browsing).  Now I have found something much, much better – a little app called StrokeIt.

Quite apart from the endless juvenile yet amusing jokes you can make about the name it is a killer app for the tablet.  At this point I should note that it is not a tablet only application – it also works with a mouse.

What does it do?  It allows you to use gestures to make your computer do your bidding by holding down the right-click button and drawing the gesture.  It is application aware, which means that the same gesture can be configured to mean different things in different applications. 

Gestures that can be configured include all the uppercase letters, the uppercase letters reversed (drawn from right to left) and a number of pre-defined directional gestures such as Left, Right, Left-Right, Right-Up etc.

Best of all it allows you to define your own actions to be performed when a given gesture is performed.  This is amazingly flexible.  Some examples of gestures I have added to StrokeIt on my tablet so far include:

• Drawing a L on the desktop to lock the PC.
• Drawing a S in Windows Media Player to change to skin mode.
• Gesturing Right-Left-Right to delete the selected item in Outlook.

The screenshot below shows the last of those as well as some of the many predefined applications.

Some applications – like Maxthon – already have gesture support.  If you are happy with this you can also tell StrokeIT not to recognise gestures in that application – very cool.

Lastly there are also some great plug-ins available, including one that adds multi-monitor support.  Using this plug-in I was able to define a gesture I use extensively while docked.  Left-Up, send the active window to the other monitor.

There is heaps of detail on the site – so have a read, download the application and give it a go.  Did I mention it is free for personal use?

This could be a useful - albeit less interesting - sidebar to Loren's efforts to use gestures to mark-up Word documents.