Working with a tablet is an absolutely wonderful experience and I cannot imagine going back to having just a keyboard — It’s too natural — and productive — for somethings…

While Microsoft did a commendable job with Windows XP Tablet 2005, they missed the mark on some key features. Apparently Vista has fixed many of the previously lacking features, but I am unwilling to install that bloatware on my computer nor be held ransom by features they can and should introduce into XP, but won’t in order to force me (and others) to unnecessarily upgrade.

Anyway, StrokeIt fills a large part of the void that Microsoft left behind, by adding gestures. Gestures are little movements that you can do with a mouse or your tablet pen that generally can be anything from a left to right movement to the letter V. You can assign each gesture a particular command or action. For example, if I draw an “L” gesture on my computer screen using my pen, it will open Microsoft Outlook. No more having to click on the icon. And that’s just the beginning. Are you tired of moving back and forth between webpages? You can assign strokes to that to.

Besides the amazing productivity that StrokeIt introduces, it has one key feature that distinguishes it from all the other programs out there that seek to mimic it. It comes in at a dandy 145k !!! An equivalent features written by Microsoft or anyone else for that matter would probably be close 2 mb — if you’re lucky!

In the past, I’ve encountered useful programs like StrokeIt, but I almost always uninstalled them because they annoyed me in someway — more commonly because they slowed down my computer. No such problem with StrokeIt. I cannot ever imagine not having this program on my computer. I give it a solid 10.

However, if there was one feature I could add to StrokeIt, it would be the ability to scroll in circles, kind of like an I-pod does. And while StrokeIt lacks this feature, you can write plugins for it. In the meantime, I’ve found a program that fills this void, which I’ll write about at another time….

StrokeIt – Mouse Gestures for Windows

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