Touch Gestures with Visio

A little while ago I spotted a post by Luke Wroblewski in which he has produced a Touch Gesture reference guide.  The guide identifies ‘core gestures’ across the following platforms:

• iPhone
• Windows Phone 7
• Palm webOS
• Android
• OSX (trackpad and Magic Mouse)
• Windows 7
• Wacom Bamboo
• GestureWorks (Flash)
• Microsoft Surface

Being a multitouch fan (the Dell Studio 17 is a great machine) I contacted Luke and developed three Visio touch gesture shapes – Hand, TouchPoints and Arrow.  You can now download the zipped Visio stencil and template set over at Luke’s reference guide post.  The stencil and template work on Visio 2003, 2007 and 2010, and there’s a ReadMe text file that describes how to install the files correctly.

For this post I thought I’d write a quick review of how these shapes work…

The Hand Shape

As per each of the shapes, the Hand shape options can be set via the right-click context menu:

Using the context menu you can choose from one of three types:- Flat, Raised (pinch) and Raised (spread):

While the Raised hand types are basically static, the Flat type supports further configuration.  Selecting the shape in this mode will display two (yellow) control handles that allow you to set the angle of the Index finger and thumb:

If the Secondary index finger option is checked then this is displayed with a dotted line behind the primary one.

The remaining fingers can be set to Retracted, Extended (default) or Custom, via the Shape Data window.  Selecting this last option displays a control handle on the respective finger and allows the finger to be set to any vertical point between the retracted and extended lengths:

The TouchPoints Shape

The TouchPoints shape can be set to Tap, Press or Double Tap types and can contain 1 to 4 points. (Note – Double Tap is only available when the Touch points property is set to 1.)

The positions of points 2 to 4 are governed by the position of point 1, which is set to the alignment box of the shape.  Their relative positions, however, can be set using the control handles, available when the shape is selected:

The Arrow Shape

The final shape, the Arrow, supports two modes:- Circle (default) and Line:

In Circle mode, the start of the arrow is set to 0 degrees or 3 o’clock as you look at the shape.  This can be changed by rotating the shape using the (blue) rotation handle at the top of the shape when selected.  The end of the arrow, or point, position is set using the (yellow) control handle.

In Line mode the angle is changed by using the rotation handle, as above, and the arrow ends can be set via the context menu:

Both Line and Circle modes support a Thin and Thick setting, with the overall size governed by the size of the shape’s alignment box.

What’s Next

Well I hope that covers how the shapes function reasonably clearly, but if you’re interested in how the shapes are constructed I’ll be covering that in the next post.