Though most people think of a nice gesture as something like holding a door for the next person at the grocery store, or remembering to sent a birthday card to your ex, a new breed of software developers have a whole different take on the word.

Gestures have become the call name for a whole new area of interface development that goes beyond the mouse and keyboard. And really, almost a decade into the third millennium, aren’t mice and keyboards feeling like your parents interface already? It is time for the next leap and companies like Microsoft are working hard to be the one to deliver it.

Microsoft recently gave some samples of things to come, a computer world where you can use your hands near–not even on–your computer screen to direct its actions. Want to enlarge an image, just use two hands in something of a stretching pantomime and the image on screen follow along. Reps from MS said this could be accomplished with simple web cams as input. Wild.

The MS reps also said this technology will be commonplace in about eight years. Until then? Well until then we can start getting our feet wet with other products out this year like Apple’s iPhone which uses similar ideas to navigate and move items around the small high definition screen.

Don’t want to spend that much on your phone just yet but don’t want to be left out of the party either? There are at least two plugins for Mozilla Firefox that allow gesture based navigation. The one we use is Mouse Gestures which lets us right-click and drag the mouse to achieve the following:

LEFT: to move to the previous web page (like the left arrow)

LEFT: to move to the next web page (like the right arrow)

UP: While over a link it opens that link in a new tab

DOWN: While over a link it opens that link in a new window

The user must only do that right-click and drag for a short distance, perhaps a half inch or a bit more. With a few minutes of practice you will have it down pat and never want to go back. No more nasty keyboard shortcuts or worse yet, having to drag the mouse all the way up to those arrows. We are crazy about this plugin, and it is available free at: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/39

The other plugin for Firefox for gesture based navigation is called easyGestures and works by bringing up a circular navigation ring with an array of options on it. This ring, which looks like a donut or bagel shape really, have options embedded on it and is activated every time the mouse is clicked. We have not tried this one ourselves as we preferred the more low-key interface of the previous solution. EasyGestures can be downloaded from this address: http://easygestures.mozdev.org