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OpenOffice launches mouse with 18 buttons, 52 commands
- evdawg 17y ago"The Mouse team have worked closely with experts from the OpenOffice.org User Experience project." Ah. Well that explains it.
- pierrefar 17y agoIs this some kind of PR stunt or a real product? This sentence from the press release smells of PR: "The OpenOfficeMouse includes default profiles for the five core OpenOffice.org applications based on 662 million datapoints compiled by the usage tracking facility incorporated into OpenOffice.org 3.1."
- omouse 17y agoIt's a joke? -_-'
- bdr 17y agoThey've found that almost everyone only uses two of the buttons -- but it's a different two for each person.
- tjogin 17y agoI guess that also means that almost everyone thinks sixteen of the buttons are just in the way.
- wmf 17y agoSo it's a "long tail" mouse.
- johnbender 17y agoThe c++ of mouses.
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoThat's why mouse buttons are programmable? I'm not sure if you're joking but that would make 4 buttons (+scroll) optimal no? Or you could have a thumb button as "meta".
- windsurfer 17y agoI used to have a mouse that had some fancy buttons on it. I only attached two crucial commands to the mouse: One button was a double click, one button was a hide/unhide desktop. I couldn't figure out what to do with the other ones.
- shalmanese 17y agoI have a MX Revolution and here's how I bind my buttons: Left Click Right Click Middle Click (Open tab in new window) Double Click Copy Paste Next Tab Previous Tab Close Next App Previous App
- geocar 17y agoI bind mine to modifier keys, like Alt, and Super. Then I can chord-resize windows and chord-drag them from the middle of the window without doing the one-hand-keyboard-one-hand-mouse move.
- fshaun 17y agoI wouldn't know what to do with the OOMouse's extra buttons, either. 18 buttons is more than I could remember, much less reliably click. For a few years I've been using mice with "only" 2 extra buttons, mapped to CTRL and ALT. Because they are close together on the thumb side, it's easy to click either one or both together. This is especially nice for gaming, allowing access to the C-, M- or C-M- equivalents of a key without moving the keyboard hand. This matches office application use cases such as selecting text and operating on it, whether both hands can act in parallel.
- nzmsv 17y agoIt's like emacs for office users :)
- gchpaco 17y agoOnly if you're expected to chord three or more buttons on a regular basis.
- endtime 17y agoWith good software, this could be an interesting gaming mouse. Can't really picture using it for office work though.
- chadaustin 17y agoAnyone remember those old CAD mice from the 80s? With the custom mousing surface, region-sensitive reticle, and 12+ buttons on the mouse? Those things were so cool...
- joe_bleau 17y agoDo you mean a digitizer, or a mouse? The digitizers were impressive, but we later switched to a multibutton mouse for AutoCAD (circa R12 for DOS). I think it had 8 auxiliary buttons in a 4x2 grid, along with the primary left and right button. They were great for AutoCAD, as you could put a different osnap on each aux button, but the company disappeared before writing a windows driver. I still have one around here, somewhere...
- chadaustin 17y agoHm, I think I meant a mouse. I remember it had a grid of buttons (each with a different purpose, like a ColecoVision controller) and a really elaborate mousing surface. What brand was the mouse you're talking about?
- Luc 17y agoSomething like http://www.interworldna.com/images/summa/summa-cursors.jpg http://www.interworldna.com/images/summa/summa-cursors.jpg or http://www.interworldna.com/GTCO/gtco-ultima.php http://www.interworldna.com/GTCO/gtco-ultima.php ? There's a lot of brands of these, they're called digitizers.
- joe_bleau 17y agoFound it--it's a Prohance Powermouse 70. Looks like it has the standard left/right buttons, plus 15 additional buttons. Normal config is F1-F10, plus esc, ctrl, user, fn, and enter. The driver allowed you to customize it for apps such as AutoCAD. Typical mechanical ball mouse guts, DE-9 serial connector. Actually pretty high quality, as you'd expect for a CAD peripheral back in the day. Couldn't find an images online (I could take one if anyone is really interested), but I did see that someone was trying to reverse engineer the protocol: http://stuartl.longlandclan.yi.org/blog/2006/03/03/reverse-engineering-project-driver-for-the-prohance-powermouse-70/ http://stuartl.longlandclan.yi.org/blog/2006/03/03/reverse-e... chadaustin's mention of a custom mousing surface makes me think he was looking at a digitizer, although it could have been an old school optical mouse, such as the ones Sun used to use.
- thegoleffect 17y agoA little late or early for April Fool's? O_o.
- MaysonL 17y agoIf this thing is for real, I'm going to buy one. I can see using it as a chording keyboard (or at least trying to ;-}).
- shaddi 17y agoThe site seems to be slashdotted, here's a better link: http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/06/openofficemouse-isnt-free-isnt-pretty/ http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/06/openofficemouse-isnt-free...
- vollmond 17y agoi could see this being good for gaming, but if you're enough of a power office user to remember these buttons, won't you just be using the keyboard shortcuts anyway, thus never needing the mouse?
- slapshot 17y agoThe fact that people in this discussion aren't sure if it's a joke tells you something about the OpenOffice experience. Now all we need is some brash young designer to skin the default screen for each program, tell OO to fire its whole experience staff because they obviously can't tell their heads from their tails, and write a blog about it.
- kuda 17y agoOddly the site doesn't seem to mention if the mouse is compatible with Solaris or OpenSolaris.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoIs this a joke?
- roder 17y agoyes
- MikeCapone 17y agoIf you had to ask, they've probably proven their point that there's something wrong with a lot of Open Source software :)
- rbanffy 17y agoOddly enough, I never had any problems with OOo. It just works. On the other hand, when my office's computers got bumped from MS Office 2003 to 2007, I saw a lot of people bitching about how difficult it was to find stuff and making lots of Ray Charles with moving furniture jokes.
- MikeCapone 17y agoI don't really use Office very often, and when I do I find it to be a total rube golberg machine. I figure that most people are just so used to it that they don't realize it anymore.
- rbanffy 17y ago"Works like Windows" has been passing for "easy to use" for much too long. My 70-year-old mother migrated from MacOS 9 and Office 98 straight to Gnome without much complain and without any problem.
- ComputerGuru 17y agoSo where does Windows come in this picture? You have her going from Mac to Linux...
- nrr 17y agoMy hands hurt just looking at that damnable thing. I wouldn't be able to use it for more than 10 minutes at a stretch because I'd end up losing all feeling in my right hand. ... if I were a right-hand mouser to begin with, that is, all joking aside.
- b-man 17y agoWell, it is probably a joke, but anyone familiar with Engelbart's mother of all demos would certanly see a vague similarity ...
- jsz0 17y agoIt's obviously unusable for 99% of the world but I could see it being useful in very specific tasks. For example, large amounts of data processing that requires template responses/codes, warehouse processing, maybe point of sale?
- ekiru 17y agoI actually want one.
- Concours 17y agoThis sounds like a very bad Joke: "the OpenOfficeMouse is intended to provide a faster and more efficient user interface" This is really a joke. Nightmare for every user,a scandal for usability experts, if it at least looks good, very ugly thing there for $ 74.99 ? Com'on folk, most of us only have 5 fingers/per hand....18 buttons???. It's a joke!
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- cnicolaou 17y agoIt's not even wireless... This is definitely a joke. And what a timing, just when Apple introduces the magic mouse with lots of movement functions.
- yason 17y agoThanks, but no thanks. I'm still waiting for the Emacs mouse.
- tspiteri 17y agoEmacsers don't use the mouse! Unless it has enough keys we can do without a keyboard altogether, that is.
- rlachenal 17y agoEven if this turned out to be a real product, they'd probably just claim that it was just a joke now.
- dw0rm 17y agolol, why not to release a full-feature QWERTY mouse :D
- some1else 17y agoI perform music on two Monome 64s and a Trigger Finger. That sums up to 144 buttons, of which 64 are used at all times. But there are only about 8 functional distinctions between those, so 18 mouse buttons is probably an overkill. However, If this is about the complexity of the Open Office user interface, I don't see this joke contribute in any way, not even by vaguely pointing out the flaws. The developer mailing list is probably the best place to start a discussion. The same amount of time that went into the OOMouse would have resulted in some fine UI concepts.
- urlwolf 17y agoSomewhere now, S. jobs is having thoughts of approaching this mouse and pop out all buttons but one with a keyring :)