gestures

Windows 8 will offer a unique approach to logging in by letting you use a photo as your password.

Since traditional passwords and PIN numbers can be hard to remember and use, Microsoft wanted to cook up a different log-in method, especially one that would prove more user-friendly on touchscreen devices.

As detailed in the latest Building Windows 8 Blog, Zach Pace, a program manager on Microsoft's You Centered Experience team, explained how using a photo as your password can make things simple to remember as well as secure. Already available in the Developer Preview, this new method consists … Read more

In OS X Lion, Apple has increased and enhanced the operating system's scrolling behaviors, with one aspect being that when you scroll beyond the extent of the window contents, the window will show a textured background followed by bouncing back in a smooth fashion.

You can see this behavior clearly in Safari, where if you scroll up and down quickly, when you get to the end of the page you will see the textured backdrop appear, followed by the page moving back to cover this up. This behavior also works in the horizontal direction, and should spring back to … Read more

Apple's iOS 5 added a handful of multi-finger gestures for iPad users, and a new patent filing suggests more could be on the way to it and other iOS devices as part of a future software update.

A newly published patent application from Apple, pulled up by PatentlyApple today, details just such an addition. The application cited the difficulties in seeing what's on screen with small-screened devices when moving through content using swiping finger gestures. Called "systems and methods for displaying visual information on a device," it proposes a solution in the form of two possible … Read more

Gmail isn't just cool because it's part of the Google family of services, it also has many extra features created by independent developers. These features are available to you at no additional cost by enabling them in the Labs area of the Mail settings menu. Here's a collection of 11 of the most awesome Gmail Labs features to get you started with a personalized Gmail experience:

While the name sounds like a vacation responder, it's more of a template insertion tool than anything else. You can add custom signatures or even a collection of … Read more

First popularized as an Android app, the Dolphin Browser has just swam its way onto the iPad.

Initially hitting the iOS market for the iPhone in late August, the new app, dubbed Dolphin Browser HD, takes full advantage of the real estate of Apple's 9.7-inch tablet and offers a few tricks not found in the mobile Safari app.

In Dolphin, you can hide the tab and address toolbars to see a Web page full-screen. … Read more

Admit it. There have been times when you've wanted to drop-kick your phone into the next county. But would it be satisfying to use kicking gestures to control your phone? An experimental interface lets you do just that. The idea is to provide an alternative input method when your hands are occupied.

Researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and the University of Manitoba in Canada are developing a smartphone interface that lets you kick to flick, zoom, and navigate menus. The researchers used an Xbox Kinect and tablet to simulate the interface and studied how people do with the kick gesture. A working version would use your phone's camera.

The researchers found that people can reliably kick in five directions and at two velocities, which provides enough variety for useful phone control. (See the video below.)

This could be the first smartphone interface that presents a non-negligible risk of getting you arrested. Kick someone on the sidewalk, and I'm guessing the smartphone-gesture-interface defense isn't going to get you very far with the assault charge.… Read more

Several Microsoft patent filings recently published point to new finger and stylus gestures that could be aimed at Windows 8 tablets.

The company actually filed the patent requests in January 2010 but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published them late last week.

The patent applications show that Microsoft believes finger and stylus gestures can work not only separately but together to offer a user-friendly means of input on touch surfaces. The method that unites both types of inputs would recognize the first input as one from your finger and the second one from a stylus. Using both finger … Read more

Google has released a new developer version of Chrome to re-enable a multitouch gesture that changed in Lion, the new version of Mac OS X that Apple released last week.

With the new operating system, a three-finger swipe left or right moves among different full-screen apps or desktops. That conflicted with Chrome's use of a three-finger swipe to move backward and forward in browsing history.

Yesterday, though, Google released Chrome 14.0.835.0 for Mac (and 14.0.835.0 for Linux, and 14.0.835.2 for Windows) that changes the forward and backward navigation to two-finger swipe gestures … Read more

OS X Lion changed the scrolling gestures that we were accustomed to on Snow Leopard by reversing the scroll gestures. Thankfully, Apple has built in a setting allowing you to reverse Lion's reverse scrolling.… Read more