Brass Plugins: Mime
Mime allows you to use mouse gestures in any Windows
application! Control Internet Explorer, MS Office, Windows Explorer
and even 3rd party applications with a flick of your wrist!
Introduction
Mouse gestures became popular with the Firefox
web browser. There's a great extension called "All In One Gestures"
that lets you use mouse gestures to control Firefox. Simply hold
the mouse button, move the mouse in a preset manner and you can
control your web browsing with ease. If you've never used gestures
before, they speed up your use of the application amazingly.
Unfortunately All In One Gestures only works for
Firefox. There are some gesture tools that work for Internet Explorer,
but that's it. What if you want to use mouse gestures to open and
save documents in Word? Browse around websites in Internet Explorer?
Print pages from UltraEdit? Even load MP3's in WinAmp? You 're out
of luck.
Not any more! Mime is the amazing Brass plugin
that lets you use mouse gestures in any application! All you need
to do is configure which gestures perform what actions, enable the
plugin and away you go!
Installation
Mime is included pre-installed in the Brass installation
package. If you've installed Brass, you've got Mime. Please do read
the docs to get the most out of Mime.
The principle behind Mime
First we need to take a moment to understand how
Mime works. It's important, otherwise you'll get a bit confused
when gestures don't work as you expect them to!
The first thing to remember is that Mime is dynamic.
It can register multiple gestures in any application, even ones
you haven't configured yet. When you hold down the right mouse button
and move the mouse, Mime senses a gesture is about to take place.
Mime watches how you move the mouse and waits for you to release
the right mouse button. When you do, a gesture is registered.
Mime then looks to see which application you did
this gesture in. This is called the "gesture criteria".
It then scans through all your configured gestures to see which
gesture matches the gesture you made, and has a matching criteria.
If a gesture matches, and the criteria of the gesture also match,
only then is the "gesture action" executed.
Let's do this with a practical example. We create
2 gestures. Gesture 1 has a criteria of "Only in Internet Explorer",
and an action of "Reload Page". Gesture 2 has a criteria
of "Any application", and an action of "Print Page".
You enable Mime, and open Internet Explorer. You
hold the right mouse button down and make a gesture the same as
gesture 1. Mime sees you made a gesture in Internet Explorer, then
looks at the gesture and sees it matches gesture 1. Gesture 1's
criteria state that it's only valid in Internet Explorer - which
is where you did the gesture - so the action of "Reload Page"
is taken.
Next you open Notepad, hold the right mouse button
down and make a gesture the same as gesture 1 again. Mime sees the
gesture, realises you made it in Notepad and, even though the gesture
matches gesture 1, the criteria ("Only in Internet Explorer")
weren't met. Nothing happens.
Finally, still in Notepad, you hold the right mouse
button down and make a gesture the same as gesture 2. Mime sees
the gesture and realises you were in Notepad again. The gesture
matches gesture 2, and the criteria - "Any application"
- matches, so Mime tells Notepad to print.
One advantage of this system is that the same gesture
in different applications can do different actions. Assume that
gesture 1 is "move the mouse left, then move it down".
Making this gesture in Internet Explorer will cause the "Reload
Page" action to be taken, as above. Also as above, making this
gesture in Notepad will cause nothing to happen. What we can then
do is associate this same gesture with a different action in Notepad,
for example "Save File".
Now when you move the mouse left and down in Internet
Explorer, the page is reloaded. Move the mouse left and down in
Notepad and the file is saved. Same gesture, different criteria,
different action!
This makes it really easy to configure a small
number of gestures to do a large number of actions. If you're always
loading the spraycan tool in Paintshop Pro, opening the Styles and
Formatting window in Word and reloading your MP3 playlist in WinAmp,
you can configure the exact same gesture to take the appropriate
action for each of these applications.
That's not all! You can also associate multiple
gestures with a single action. For example, you can associate "mouse
left, mouse right" and "mouse right, mouse left"
with "Print Document" in UltraEdit. Now no matter which
way you move the mouse horizontally, you'll always get the action
you wanted.
I'm sure some of this is a little confusing at
first glance. The best thing to do is to carry on reading how to
configure Mime, start using it and all will become clear.
Just to make this clear
The previous section is a bit complex and long
on text. In a couple of sentances, this is how Mime works.
We start off with a criteria - "Only in MS
Word". We then select an action - "Print my document".
We then associate a gesture with the action - "mouse left,
mouse up". The gesture is now configured in Mime.
We go to MS Word, hold down the right mouse button
and move the mouse left and up. Mime checks to see if MS Word is
configured as an exclusion (more on this later) - it's not. Mime
checks to see if there are any gestures that match "mouse left,
mouse up" - yes there is. Mime checks to see if the criteria
for this gesture ("Only in MS Word") matches where the
gesture occurred - yes it does. The action associated with the gesture
takes place.
Simple :-)
Now you know how Mime works, let's see how to configure it.
A quick word of advice
When you start learning to use Mime, you're probably going to be
really tempted to configure loads of gestures right away. That's
great, but it's also a good way to confuse yourself :-) . If you've
ever played one of those flight simulators with a thousand key combinations
to do things you'll know what I mean.
The best thing to do is to configure a few gestures you can easily
remember, then as you get used to using them you can add a few more.
You'll be surprised just how quickly you can get comfortable with
the whole process, and how many gestures you can use every day!
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