Choosing a Set of Gestures to Support

Choosing a Set of Gestures to Support

Choose a set of application gestures that work well together and that fit the functionality provided in your application. Consider the following when choosing your gesture set:

• Support commonly used real-world gestures such as scratch-out.
• Keep the number of gestures manageable. Recognition performance suffers as the number of gestures increases. Users may get confused if there are too many to remember.
• Choose gestures with glyphs that are distinct enough to avoid confusion by the user and the gesture recognizer. For example, don't include both the Up Left and the Up Left Long gestures in the same user interface.
• Choose gestures with glyphs that suggest the functions associated with them
• Maintain consistency with the suggested actions for each application gesture unless using an alternate action is both important to your application and does not confuse users.

List of Application Gestures

The following table lists the application gestures provided by Windows Vista. These gestures are enumerated in the following types:

• The ApplicationGesture enumeration, used with the ink collecting objects in Windows Forms applications and with the GestureRecognizer object in the RealTimeStylus namespace.
• The ApplicationGesture enumeration, used with Windows Presentation Foundation applications.
• The InkApplicationGesture Enumeration, used with COM applications

Note  For most gestures, the focal point, which the gesture recognizer reports as the location of the gesture, is the starting point. Arrows indicate a required direction for the stroke. All strokes, except for the arrows and exclamation point, must be drawn in a single stroke.

Gesture	Gesture Name	Suggested usage and notes
	Scratch-out	Erase content. At least three back and forth strokes are needed. The scratch-out gesture in Tablet PC Input Panel only requires a single stroke; if this might be a source of confusion to your users, you can implement scratch-out as a custom gesture.
	Triangle	Insert
	Square	No recommended action.
	Star	No recommended action.
	Check	Check-off
	Curlicue	Cut
	Double-Curlicue	Copy
	Circle	No recommended action.
	Double-circle	Paste
	Left-semicircle	Undo
	Right-semicircle	Redo
	Caret	Paste or insert
	Inverted-caret	Insert
	Chevron-left	No recommended action.
	Chevron-right	No recommended action.
	Arrow-up	Can be drawn in one or two strokes. Draw the shaft of the arrow first. Triangle heads are not supported.
	Arrow-down	Can be drawn in one or two strokes. Draw the shaft of the arrow first. Triangle heads are not supported.
	Arrow-left	Can be drawn in one or two strokes. Draw the shaft of the arrow first. Triangle heads are not supported.
	Arrow-right	Can be drawn in one or two strokes. Draw the shaft of the arrow first. Triangle heads are not supported.
	Up-left	No recommended action.
	Up-right	No recommended action.
	Down-left	No recommended action.
	Down-right	No recommended action.
	Left-up	No recommended action.
	Left-down	No recommended action.
	Right-up	Perform an Input Method Editor (IME) conversion.
	Right-down	No recommended action.
	Up-down	Undo
	Down-up	No recommended action.
	Left-right	Move cursor left
	Right-left	Move cursor right
	Up-left-long	Decrease indent
	Up-right-long	Tab
	Down-left-long	Enter
	Down-right-long	Space
	Exclamation	Draw in two strokes. Draw the line first, then draw the dot soon after, placing the dot close to the bottom of the line.

Note  The eight application gestures matching the glyphs for pen flicks are deprecated for Windows Vista and are omitted from this table. Also, the gesture enumerations include definitions for tap and double-tap gestures. These enumeration members are only needed if your application is processing the exclamation point gesture.

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Build date: 12/5/2008