Re: st: Gestures in Stata 12 for Mac

[cnguyen@stata.com]

Glenn Hoetker <Glenn.Hoetker@asu.edu> asked:

> I was intrigued to see "Enable gestures" as an option in the preferences for
> Stata 12 on the Mac (running Lion, if it matters).  Unfortunately, I can't
> find any documentation on it and can't figure it out.  I'm hoping someone else
> has had better luck than my experimentation.  Specifically,

> 1. It says "Swipe".  Swipe with how many fingers?  Important, since mulittouch
> gestures rely on a specific number of fingers being used.

Beginning in Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), the OS would notify an application
if the user made what Apple would generically refer to as a swipe gesture.  It
would tell them application which direction (up, down, left, and right) the
gesture happened in (up, down, left, and right), and which control, window, or
view it happened over.  This swipe gesture happened to be a 3 finger swipe
although the number of fingers wasn't documented by Apple.  When we
first added gesture support to Stata 12, Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) was just a
rumor and we didn't want to document the number of fingers required for
the gesture because it was possible that Apple would change it in the
future.

What happened instead is that in Lion, the OS not only reserved 3 finger
gestures for itself, it didn't even replace it with any other combination of
fingers so that we now don't even get the generic gesture notification.  This
is the same problem Google faced which forced them to remove (and later
rework) gesture support in Chrome and this is why the Stata's gesture support
doesn't work under Lion.  What we will do in a future update is to not
even show the gestures preferences when Stata for Mac is running on Lion.
They'll continue to work in Snow Leopard though.

> 2. One option for a gesture is "Go back" or "Go forward".  Totally thrown.  To
> what context does this refer?  Just the viewer (where I couldn't get it to
> work)?  Something else?

In Snow Leopard, the swipe gestures are supported by multiple Stata windows.
If you swipe to "Go back/forward", it means to go back/forward in your Viewer
history if your cursor is over a Viewer, or go back/forward in your command
history if your cursor is over the main Stata window.

> 3. Another option set is "Select next (previous) view".  What is a "View" in
> Stata?  I've not encountered the term before.

Stata has gone to what we call the "unified" interface in Stata 12 for Mac,
which is a combination of combining the Results, Command, Review, and
Variables window into one main Stata window and tabbed interfaces for the
Do-file Editor, Viewer, and Graph windows.  There's technically no longer a
Results "window" because it shares a window with the Command, Review, and
Variables "windows" so we just called them views.

What "Select next/previous view" does is allow you to change the keyboard
focus to the next/previous "view" in the main Stata window, or next/previous
tab in a tabbed window.

-Chinh Nguyen
 cnguyen@stata.com
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/