While talking about UI ideas, how about keyboard-mouse chording? Currently, while painting with the mouse (or tablet pen), the other hand is presumably idle. Would it be a good idea to be able to use keyboard keys to modify the painting action? I am thinking of some fresh ways to interact using both keybaord and mouse simultaneously. Of course, most keyboard keys are used for shortcuts, so it might be a bit confusing if those keys had a different meaning while drawing with the mouse. But on the other hand, people hardly would do it by mistake? Wild idea: Banging on the spacebar with varying frequencey while moving a drawing tool with the mouse would be similar to varying the pressure if you had a pressure-sensitive pen. Each press on the spacebar would temporarily increase the "pressure", which would then slowly decay. Or, the arrow keys could be used to finetune the "pressure" and "tilt" while moving the mouse. Some other keys could be used to modulate the colour, opacity, whatnot. I'm sure we could brainstorm more similar stuff. Has any program used an UI like this? Does it sound like a good or just goofy idea? --tml
