Gestures

Artiphon, the company behind the Orba handheld synth and MIDI controller, launched a new AR music creation app today that you don’t need a musical background to enjoy. Minibeats for iOS uses gestures, dance moves and facial expressions to craft songs played on 12 virtual instruments with colorful visual effects. You could view the Minibeats app as a phone camera equivalent to Artiphon’s music-creation hardware. Here, instead of tapping touchpads on top of an orb-like device, the app lets you wave your hands, smile, frown…

As smartphones have evolved over the years, the way we operate them have changed as well. The biggest change was when manufacturers stopped using hardware buttons and went all in with virtual software keys. Next came gestures. Apple popularized the use of gestures when it ditched the iPhone’s iconic round physical button, and soon everyone was making gesture navigation the main method of using a smartphone or tablet. Google introduced gestures with Android 9 and made numerous improvements over the next few Android…

If you love using gestures on your smartphone, then you should definitely try the Gesture Suite Android app. This application basically allows you to activate specific functions on the device by using custom gestures.Gesture Suite app allows you to create custom gestures for launching different actionsYou no longer have to use pre-defined gestures to launch your apps, for example. You can create custom ones thanks to this app. There are a ton of options that you can choose from here.The Gesture Suite app allows you to…

In the forest near Wamba, a village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, some of the last remaining bonobos breed, feed and lounge in the trees. Like other great apes, these animals have a rich social life, communicating with their fellows using some 80 types of gestures. Primatologist Kirsty Graham of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland has spent hundreds of hours among this screeching, scratching endangered troupe to decode its members’ nonverbal interactions. This work has confirmed, for example, that when…

Language policy in Canada suggests misunderstanding among government officials and the general public about language use, international language rights and their implications. Credit: Shutterstock In August 2022, Statistics Canada released the latest census data on languages in Canada. According to the data, over nine million people—or one in four Canadians—has a mother tongue other than English or French (a record high since…

FloatingMenu is an app that supercharges your phone’s navigation gestures, amongst other things. This app can make you more productive and make using your phone easier at the same time.The FloatingMenu app can make navigation gestures more usefulHow, you wonder? Well, this app actually has several use cases. For example, it can replace your navigation gestures. If you wonder why you may want to do that, well, to get some extra functionality.You can set custom trigger areas for this app. For example, if you set a trigger…

Stop, Alexa!!! Alexa, NO MORE. Image: AmazonAmazon would like to help you use your Echo Show without talking. The company is rolling out an update this week that it hopes will “make interacting with Alexa more natural.”First up is a new gesture that lets you raise your hand to stop a timer. The feature is an additional method to interact with the smart display and can be used if you can’t immediately shout “stop!” or physically tap the Echo Show to dismiss an alarm. It’s also a helpful accessibility feature. But that’s…

Apple’s CarPlay is still frustratingly basic.Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels has blogged about the frustrations he’s had migrating to a new iPhone and not having his CarPlay preferences carry over, despite every other app on his phone copying over correctly.I’m with him on that, but I’m more annoyed by the second point he highlights: CarPlay still treats every vehicle you connect to as a different thing. Instead of preserving your preferences when you plug in to a different car, it makes you set it all up again for each new…

Apple iPhone 13 miniTodd Haselton | CNBCYou use your iPhone every day, but you might only be scratching the surface of what you can do with it.For instance, the iPhone has a bunch of "hidden" menus that help you do things like search across apps, go back to the last screen, find widgets that show snapshots of certain information, or quickly turn your Wi-Fi off and on.They're hidden because they require you to make specific gestures that aren't necessarily easy to guess. But once you know where they are, they're quite…

You don’t need a touchscreen to take advantage of gestures on your Mac. If you use a Magic Mouse, you can use mouse gestures to zoom, swipe, scroll, and more. Along with these gestures, you can modify your taps, clicks, and tracking speed for your mouse. To make working or playing on your computer easier, here’s how to customize mouse gestures on Mac. Adjust point and click gesturesPoint and click gestures include those you use to scroll, secondary click (right-click), and zoom. Step 1: Open System preferences…