Hotspots besides gestures

It would be nice to have a possibility to define hotspots (global mouse-sensitive zones) reacting e.g. to mouse hover or click and use them to execute commands. I realize this could be done by another stand-alone application but as a part of StrokeIt there would be a major advantage:

1) there is already a mouse hook in StrokeIt
2) same interface is suitable: action => command
3) same command plugins can be used

I guess I posted several months ago regarding another wish - my utopian idea is that StrokeIt could be turned into a simple but effective engine encapsulating and converting different ways of input.... the structure would be the same (commands assigned to actions), but there would be more input actions to choose from (gesture, hotspot, keyboard shortcut); number of commands can easily be enhanced via plugins. And what about this: could input actions be coded to be treated as plugins too?

I am sorry for a number of questions that poured naturally out, the basic idea of hotspots revived my visions...

Thanks for StrokeIt. JP

Please search the forum before posting, it will help eliminate duplicate topics, and you'll find that this has been covered before.

-Scott

I am sorry if I missed anything but I did actually search the forum .
The only thing I found was "zoned gesture recognition" which is a different idea.

As for the "keyboard shorctut as an action" idea - yes, it has already been suggested by others but the more people ask the better ;)
It would definitely increase the power of StrokeIt - sometimes I find myself writing small utilities to do this or that (with behaviour similar to StrokeIt plugins). These utilities are usually launched by a keyboard shortcut and if I want to avoid running the utility permanently as a service I have to assign a keyb. shortcut for the shortcut (lnk) of the exe - such execution is sometimes slow. If StrokeIt was capable of reacting to keyb. actions I would simply write a plugin for StrokeIt, which could be useful for others too...

-JP

JP,

You're right, adding all of those features would be easy and might even be nice for some users. However, doing that goes against most of my design principals for StrokeIt. It's designed to do one thing (mouse gestures) as well as it possibly can. I have no interest in creating yet another hotkey commander or in adding additional system overhead by continuously processing mouse movements to detect regions or hotspots.

On the other hand, I may look into allowing other programs to interact with StrokeIt so that you could take an existing HotKey manager allow it to activate StrokeIt Actions. That way you could just chain the programs together and obtain the desired effect. No promises, but I might look into it.

-- Jeff

My mistake, Jan, I confused your hotspots with zoned gestures. I apologize.

-Scott

@ Jeff:
I see your point, sounds reasonably, thanks.
Regarding the overhead - I supposed that StrokeIT uses WH_MOUSE hook and the MouseProc is called for every mouse message so the slow down would not be so painful. Anyway it could be turned off...

@ Scott:
np

-JP

About WM_MOUSE and MouseProc, they didn´t really add up overhead.

I´m using StrokeIt on my Pentium III 1GHZ and everything is so 'in a blazed speed' that sometimes I think the program could be ´Mo-SLowed´ heheh :) Even a trembled ´---´ (left-to-right) could go to several pages ahead (in internet explorer), if I don´t press right mouse button firmly.

StrokeIT is very well optimized, congratulations! It´s only using 210k of my system memory in XP... whilst other programs ´eat´ a minimum of 3000k >:(

Well....Keep up the good work, thank you! :D
Ivan