In this post I will review “High Sign”, an excellent freeware mouse gesture program. While Samer has previously reviewed gMote, another mouse gesture program, I planned on reviewing StrokeIt which has been around for a long while now and is almost the founding father of freeware mouse gesture software. Unfortunately, when I installed StrokeIt, it did not leave a very good impression, with the software not working fully and with unclear implementation step. I therefore began a search for a better alternative, and High Sign is the program that I found.
[Editor’s note: this review was written by Freewaregenius contributor Jason H. Check out his tech blog: 404techsupport.com].
Mouse Gestures serve much the same purpose as keyboard shortcuts; they’re supposed to make you faster, more productive, more efficient, and more comfortable. Instead of switching hands from mouse to keyboard and back or minimizing everything to the desktop, mouse gestures allow you to perform actions or start programs all from the mouse with a few swift movements. High Sign comes pre-loaded with a number of gestures, some work for all applications like closing or minimizing a window.
You can create your own gestures by entering a Training mode. High Sign starts in Training mode by default or right-click on the system tray icon to find the option to toggle. Anything you draw (by holding down the right-click) in training will prompt and ask what you drew. You can specify an existing gesture or create a new gesture. The prompt offers what it thinks the closest existing gesture is. This is a good function because it can let you know if the gestures are too much alike where a different action might occur because your gesturing was a little sloppy. For example, when I drew the number 4 below, it prompted with a pre-existing gesture ’H’. When you toggle out of Training Mode, it will just perform any actions that are associated with the gestures you’ve drawn.
High Sign seems to be very forgiving and very accurate when it comes to getting the correct gesture from what you drew. When you create a new gesture, you can specify the action that it takes to come from a list of preset functions like sending a hotkey, sending a keystroke, running a command, opening a web browser or others. You can choose to affect a select program by choosing from those processes running at the time. To send keystrokes, you use the Send Keys syntax. You can do a quick Google Search to find the Send Keys syntax. As an example, the keystroke Alt-D would be %D, Ctrl-C would be ^C, and taking a screenshot of the active window (Alt + Print Screen) would be %{PRTSC}. For some more tips on using High Sign, read the brief wiki article on the High Sign page.
High Sign, by default, does not start up with Windows. It has a system tray icon that allows you access to all the different functions. You can find the preferences and preconfigured actions and gestures. High Sign comes as 820 KB installer and a 50 MB process when running. You can’t easily toggle HighSign off or on, but you can close the program from the system tray.
The preferences allow you to customize a lot of the different options. You can change the color of your line and startup options. It also allows a sneak peak at some upcoming features that could be pretty cool like opacity control and an “Ignore” key option.
While High Sign is only a 2nd alpha preview release, it’s fully functional. If the program continues to see development time, I have to believe that it’s going to be made into one stellar program as far as mouse gesture programs can go. It was originally created as a StrokeIt replacement but the developer has changed his goals to be more ambitious than just recreating StrokeIt. High Sign is open source and hosted by CodePlex, a site and repository for open-source projects.
Version Tested: Alpha Preview 2
Compatibility: WinAll.
Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 2.09 megs).
50 MB process when running?!?!?!?!!!
Noe YHIS is truly a non-functional piece of crap, at least on Win7 RC1.
50MB process? Talk about bloat. StrokeIt needs just a couple hundred KB. As I started HighSigh it needed 26 MB. I hope future releases of HighSigh will be better, if they ever appear. The ALPHA PREVIEW is already 6 months old and in its current state hardly a replacement for StrokeIt, as there are too many features missing. It’s good for users who can’t handle StrokeIt and need assistants (like the reviewer). I’ve a feeling HighSign was written, because StrokeIt had problems with Vista/Win7. A recent update of StrokeIt (big surprise after years of nothing) fixed this issue. I hope the author of HighSigh still has motivation to work on his tool, as an alternative to StrokeIt would be a nice thing and I’m curious to find out if the author can do a better StrokeIt.
@Rygel:
Thanks. It’s not that I couldn’t handle StrokeIt, it’s just that I shouldn’t have to. The creation of new gestures and other settings are non-intuitive. The StrokeIt interface is clunky, the latest update finally came after years of silence, and the gesture does not actually get drawn on my Server 2008 machine (it “works” but there’s no ink shown). I messed around with it for a few days to get the ins and outs of it and came to understand it just fine, it simply came down to the fact that StrokeIt was not something I would recommend.
In my research, I stumbled upon High Sign and figured it was worth highlighting. If you like StrokeIt, stick with it, if not, try something else. It might be a better match for somebody else. As I stated in the review, High Sign is a program worth keeping an eye on. It might or might not be ready for primetime yet, depending on what you want to do with it. One hope I had of this review was that it might motivate the developer to continue his work as High Sign has show plenty of potential.
Thanks for that, Jason H.
I can’t wait to know about other clunky and non-intuitive freewares that you wouldn’t recommend. If they’re as good as StrokeIt, I’ll be eternally grateful.
Please keep us posted
Jason,
Thanks for the great review of High Sign. I found your page from the referrer link on codeplex while investigating a large spike in traffic
. I am the author of High Sign and wanted to respond to some of the issues mentioned in the comments above. Some of your readers mentioned the lack of new releases on the project. I’ll respond to that by saying that High Sign is a hobby for me, and I have others. That being said, lately I’ve had to focus all of my attention to work and family (I just got married 
). I am planning on picking the project back up during the colder months.
Also, I’d like to respond to the bloat issue. I know that High Sign appears to take up quite a bit of memory, and never lets go of it. The problem there is .NET and a little bit my fault. It’s .NET’s fault because of the nature of the framework and it’s memory management. I won’t go into details, but if you’re interested in knowing more about it, do a quick search for the term “.NET Working Set”. It’s my fault because, I’ve not spent any time really optimizing the code for memory usage. StrokeIt is a native C application and manages it’s own memory, while this is great for memory usage, it can cause system instability and make implementing more advance features a greater challenge and take more development time. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE StrokeIt, I mean heck, I loved it enough to imitate it.
It’s not fair to compare High Sign to StrokeIt until I say so
Thanks for everyone’s interest in the project, and hey, if other developers want to get involved and help to move High Sign forward, I encourage that!
Dylan Vester
Oh yeah, and by the way, Jeff’s update to StrokeIt to correct stability issues on Vista has no effect on my willingness to continue development on High Sign. Believe me, drawing on the screen in Vista and Windows 7 is a mountain of a challenge (seriously).
Dylan Vester
Hey Dylan.
I’m just curious. If you love StrokeIt, why did you choose to imitate it? Is it for full compatibility with newer Windows, or maybe that you don’t like its interface or feature set?
I discovered StrokeIt a few weeks back and I really don’t miss anything on my XP, hence my question.
Good luck and congrats for your marriage, BTW
Hey guys (and Dylan!),
I worked on High Sign a little bit with Dylan (only messing around with plugins and minor things, he did all the ground work). I too didn’t like that .NET takes up so much RAM and decided to start from scratch and make a native gesture program (http://www.strokesplus.com). Of course, when Jeff updated StrokeIt to work with Vista/Win 7, I kind of lost my motivation.
But, 2.5 years later and I stumbled across the code in my folder and renewed my efforts. StrokeIt covers most of what I wanted to do, but my biggest problem was that you can never get in touch with Jeff, sometimes it’s months until (and if) he responds.
Plus there were some features (like key/mouse modifiers) that people always requested, but he never added anything new; simply updated it because it was clearly broken at the time. My little effort adds many modifiers to gestures (including mouse only, without drawing) and utilizes Lua scripting for all actions. The program exposes granular functions to Lua, so you can really handle the action however you wish.
Oh, and it runs in the background (not when program dialogs are open) only using 250-500k of RAM =)
Give it a spin, I’m always interested in hearing what you think and I actually fix sh*t when it’s broken as well as add features.
Rob