When we get used to an operating system, and memorise the keyboard short-cuts, we see our productivity increase. Tasks that would normally take 3 mouse clicks (after the time taken to move your hand from the keys to the mouse), can be easily executed in 2 or 1 key-presses.The simplest example would be when you accidentally close a tab in Firefox when you don’t mean to. Normally, you would have to go to “History » Recently Closed Tab Pick » Tab”, as compared to “Ctrl+Shift+T” if you’re keyboard friendly.⌘

However, when one switches operating systems, this is the biggest obstacle. We grow accustomed to it, and somehow don’t want to take the pains to learn up new ones again. However, the one thing that remains constant through the changes is the mouse, and how we use it. The point-click interface is the same everywhere. The problem though, is that using the mouse is slow. That’s because it involves too much of movement and everything seems to be far away from the current cursor position. On the keyboard, our hands stay in a fixed position, with every key a finger’s length away at the maximum. To make mouse usage faster, we need an interface overhaul that follows the same principle — minimise movement.⌘

I was introduced to the concept by Firefox’s All-in-one Gestures extension, but it seems this has existed way before that. In either case, if you don’t count the movement back to the keyboard to type in a URL, mouse gestures makes Firefox a lot more faster to use and navigate around in. AioG adds in a few more gestures of its own, called “Rocker” gestures which work with the mouse-wheel.⌘

The issue is this feature being a third-party thing. We need to install extra software to have it as a part of the system. Why can’t Apple (or Microsoft for that matter) add it natively to the operating system so that it is usable throughout? It’ll become definitely easier to navigate around Finder, Preferences, multiple windows etcetera. Instead of moving the mouse all the way to the corners to show/hide Dashboard and windows, a simple gesture could make it so much more convenient.⌘

The good thing is that these gestures are extremely intuitive (drag left to go backwards), and can be made homogeneous across systems. We won’t have to learn them up again, and hence productivity doesn’t take a hit. Of course, one can only program so many gestures to actions, but they could start by including the most basic ones (and offer the rest for re-mapping).⌘

The entire idea here is to reduce the amount of movement it takes to execute actions. The frequent movement (I’m taking a guess here) is towards the menu-bar of windows. Macs have a fixed menu-bar at the top of the screen, so it’s quite intuitive as it is. But on Windows, the menu-bar is a part of the window, hence one has to worry about variable window dimensions, which takes that extra one-to-two seconds. Not to be fussy, but when one uses as much as we do throughout the day, those valuable seconds add up.⌘

The mouse is definitely due a make-over. The context menu is the system designer’s idea of what actions fit the context. There is no easy way to change those. So this seems to be a good way to fix it. After all, the GUI involves graphics — why not use it to it’s potential?⌘