It’s actually kind of weird. Mac OS X has a click & hold gesture in its Dock, as an alternative for right clicking or — since Snow Leopard — for Exposé. iPhone OS has a tap & hold gesture to select text or to bring up some options for links in Safari. On the other hand, I have also seen web applications replacing the browser’s context menu with their own, which, in my opinion, is downright annoying.
But for some reason, I’ve never seen a web application use a click & hold gesture, certainly not for a context menu. A quick search on Google didn’t really bring up anything either. Despite the fact that it could be so useful, if only to not hijack the right mouse button. Am I really the first one to think of this? Hard to imagine for something so trivial.
Anyway, since I couldn’t really find anything that does this, I just conjured up a proof of concept myself. It could probably use some improvement, but it conveys the general idea pretty well, as long as you’re not using Internet Explorer even in Internet Explorer.
Update (March 26th, 2010)
I created a jQuery plugin that adds the click & hold gesture as a custom event, which makes it ridiculously easy to bind your own code to it. You can read more about it and of course download it on the special demo page I created.
