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Flipper - version 0.2, updated 2003-11-01

After using Opera's mouse gesture interface, and then Mozilla's, I began wishing that all the applications I use supported them. That's when I decided to develop Flipper.

Features:

  1. User defined mouse gestures.
  2. Quick task switching (roll the mouse wheel with the right mouse button held down).
  3. Caps Lock as Enter (reduces mouse to keyboard hand movements).
  4. Cursor keys for left hand (via holding down Caps Lock with pinky).
  5. Control-V pastes clipboard contents into command box (no more switching to the mouse to right click for paste).
  6. Control-Right-Drag for "normal" right drag functionality.

Flipper allows you to use mouse gestures to interact with any Windows program. To generate a gesture, hold down the right (secondary) mouse button and move the mouse. When done performing the gesture, let the mouse button up. For example, when using a web browser (IE, Mozilla, etc.) you can go back to the previous page by holding down the right mouse button and dragging the mouse backwards. This gesture is denoted by this symbol:

left

To define your own gestures, right-click the Flipper icon on the task bar and choose "Open GUI". You can then load the "Defaults.flp" file (via "File/Open" and add or remove gestures. You may want to save your gesture file with a different name. To make your changed gestures active, press the "Activate" button on the toolbar (denoted by a red exclamation mark), or choose "Activate" from the "File" menu.

The other feature of Flipper is built-in keyboard remapping. The keyboard remapping features are intended to reduce the number of times the user must move his hand from the mouse to the keyboard, thus improving productivity.

When enabled, Flipper changes the Caps Lock key to duplicate the Enter key. When the Caps Lock key is held down the keys under the left hand are changed as shown below.

W  E  R      Home  Up    Page Up  
S  D  F  ->  Left  Down  Right    
X     V      End         Page Down

Note that the traditional Caps Lock functionality is available by holding down the Control or Alt key when pressing Caps Lock.

Here are some of the supported gestures (see the Defaults.flp file for all of them):

left Backspace In web browsers, go back in the document history. Also useful for removing the selection when working within a document.
right Alt-Right In web browsers, go forward in the document history.
up New Tab/Window In Mozilla, create a new, blank tab. In Internet Explorer, create a new window viewing the active page.
up down Reload (F5) In Mozilla, Internet Explorer, or Opera, reload the current page. Note: this gesture is up, then down.
down left Enter Simulate the pressing of the "Enter" key.
right up Control-Page Up Go to top of the document.
right down Control-Page Down Go to bottom of the document.
down right Control-W or Alt-F4 Close the current tab in Mozilla or close the current window for anything else.
left-down-right Control-C Copy selection to clipboard
right-down-left Control-V Paste clipboard contents
mouse wheel Switch Apps Hold the right (secondary) mouse button down and roll the mouse wheel to move through a list of all the open applications. After selecting the appropriate one, let up on the mouse button and the application will be made visible.

Flipper has been tested on Windows 2000 and XP. It should also work on NT 4.0 and 2003. It will not work on 95, 98, or ME.

To try flipper, just download and run this self-contained installation program: Flipper-0.2.exe.

If you have any comments or suggestions about Flipper, feel free to email me.