Think Different — It’s more than just a clever former marketing slogan of Apple Computer, it’s a line that many of it’s independent developers take to heart when coming up with innovative new ideas for their applications. Today’s review focuses on just such a developer, Gus Mueller of Flying Meat software and one of his latest creations, Fly Gesture.

Fly Gesture is one of those applications that you would pull up when you really wanted to show your PC using friends what makes using a Macintosh so special because aside from the raw cool factor of this program, there really isn’t anything quite like it on the PC. So what is it? Fly Gesture is billed as Mouse Gestures the Easy Way which makes Fly Sketch a highly customizable productivity tool. By default, Fly Sketch is activated via a hot key (but can easily be changed) and once pressed you are presented with a qasi-transparent grid showing a series of dots 5 across and 5 down. It’s here that the real fun begins.

The application comes with 35 pre-defined ‘gestures’ but don’t let the term scare you away, a gesture is nothing more than a quick game of connect the dots. For example, draw a triangle (without the bottom connector line) and you’ve just told Fly Gesture to open your web browser and navigate to apple.com, while a quick line drawn from left to right tells the browser to go ‘back’ to the previous page (and quite logically, a line from left to right tells the browser to navigate forward one screen).

Fly Gesture’s Catalog dialog gets you up to speed extremely quickly. For each command available, as soon as you click on it, a small version of the drawing board shows you visually exactly how you need to draw shape to trigger that action. For the geekier folks in the group, directly below that, it shows the corresponding AppleScript that is executed to accomplish the task at hand. The real beauty here is that while the default actions are useful, the sky truly is the limit here and you can easily create your own Fly Gesture actions using a very visual set of tools that even your mother could get the hang of. I first put this application to use a few weeks ago and took to it right from the get go but after I took the time to customize it to my own needs, it quite literally became my right hand man helping me to get my daily work done more efficiently.

You don’t have to use the program for long before it becomes really obvious that Gus is one of those developers who just really gets what designing good Mac software is all about. It’s beautifully designed, very intuitive yet extremely powerful. I have to tell you that this is one of those applications that describing it just doesn’t do it justice and you really should take a moment and download it and take advantage of the free trial. After getting to know Fly Gesture, it didn’t take much to get me to try some of Flying Meat’s other software which you can expect to see reviews of here in the future.

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