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MouseContext

When Lauren Brichter came up with Tweetie for the iPhone (which unfortunately has become the official Twitter app now) he introduced a new UI element which was downright brilliant. To load new tweets, all you got to do is to drag and release the whole table of tweets and a nice indicator at the top appears to show you that new tweets are being loaded. 

This new feature has been so intuitive and obvious that I started to miss it in other applications within the first day of using it and a lot of people I talked to experienced the same. 

After playing with the iPad for some days I have a pretty similar feature which I start to miss. But this time not in other iPad applications but on my Mac in Safari. 

It has become so natural to me to push and hold an image on the iPad for example to get the context menu that I really start to miss the push and hold gesture on my Mac even with the mouse which is pretty insane. 

I started yesterday to recreate that gesture in Safari with Mootools and it seems to work pretty well for me. I don’t know if other users see this as intuitive as I do and I guess you can’t add it to a web app without explaining it, but I think it really can help to add nice functionality to an interface without cluttering it. 

Please check out the Demo over on my server and feel free to download and improve the first version I got on Github. I appreciate any feedback, so don’t hesitate to send me a tweet or a dm.