Multi-Button OpenOfficeMouse At OOoCon 2009 265
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by
ScuttleMonkey
from the flying-in-the-face-of-simple-design dept.
from the flying-in-the-face-of-simple-design dept.
An anonymous reader writes "WarMouse has announced their new multi-button OpenOfficeMouse for OpenOffice.org at the 2009 OOoCon in Orvieto, Italy. The mouse, which features 18 buttons, a scroll wheel, and an analog joystick, has double-click functionality on every button and stores up to 63 application and game profiles in its 512k of flash memory. The OpenOfficeMouse runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X; its customization software will be released as free and open source software." We couldn't decide if this was a protest against Apple's new magic mouse, an elaborate practical joke, or just plain insanity run amok. In any case, it is hard to imagine a world in which so many tiny buttons on a mouse make sense.
Oh yeah? (Score:5, Insightful)
God damnit (Score:1, Insightful)
Metaphors (Score:5, Insightful)
What if, for a start... (Score:4, Insightful)
the OpenOffice "effort" split into the (clumsy) user interface and (not that good) underlying render library? And make the whole thing available in a more free license?
Instead of coming up with such an ergonomical disaster [openofficemouse.com]?
While I resent using Microsoft Office because of its sheer cost (its business model being but a nail in the coffin), I have to admit that the look and feel of the Great Evil(tm) outweighs that of OpenOffice by (hundreds of) miles. Such a pointless effort from the OO staff just makes me wonder whether Sun (or is that Oracle?) just want to ditch OpenOffice altogether. Well, fine, but they could just ditch it by dropping support for it and changing its license so that a real, motivated community take it over and make something really useful out of it.
overkill (Score:3, Insightful)
It's too bad that hardware built today has little to no ability to just add or remove components as needed instead of designing a sepate piece of hardware for every possible combination. Imagine instead of buying a mouse with 18 buttons and tons of things you may or may not need; you could get a bare bones mouse that you could just clip on new components as you needed. As an analogy, it'd be like snapping lego blocks together to make different things yourself is better than having to buy a specific configuration of blocks that can not be modified. Want a 10 button mouse? get the components together and snap the pieces into place. Hate that trackball after all? swap it out for a laser tracking component instead. The possibilities are nearly endless. Of course, there's already something liek this just not for mice and such yet... Open hardware.
Re:Metaphors (Score:3, Insightful)
Too many choices and very confusing interfaces. Good job guys!
Yeah, but it's so customizable! Sure, you might get overwhelmed by the clutter and the huge number of rarely-used settings, and yeah, maybe the result is confusing and a little bit ugly. But boy oh boy, it sure is flexible!
And I'm sure the minute they started removing some of those buttons to try to clean things up, there'd be nerds coming out of the woodwork to complain...
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:3, Insightful)
They're not useless - those stupid gadgety mice with a bazillion button ensures that the poor little 2 button and a wheel optical mice never cost more than $15. If simple mice were the norm I might be paying $75 for a decent one :).
Re:I call Shenanigans (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, if anyone wants to see what this monstrosity looks like now that the site is slashdotted, I got this in the coral cache: http://www.openofficemouse.com.nyud.net/branding/images/OOM-OSS.jpg [nyud.net]
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a mouse (Logitech MX Revolution) with the functional equivalent of 10 buttons.
You know, I though it was a pretty cool idea when I bought it, but I now must admit that I really only use 2 buttons.
Re:God damnit (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it wasn't that long ago that the scroll wheel was added. I thought that was pretty cool. Also, the side buttons on my mouse are pretty useful while browsing the internet or gaming.
But if you're still attached to your same old mechanical ball-style mouse with only two buttons and no scroll wheel, I guess that's your prerogative.
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but they're also hard to find if you want "just a basic" anything but USB mouse. For instance, it's very difficult to find an encrypted, bluetooth, full-sized, optical, wheel mouse without side-buttons.
Whoever thought side buttons are a good idea for a non-gaming mouse should be drug out into the street and pelted with rotten produce. Freakin' have to hold the mouse ever so gingerly if you don't want to accidentally flip web pages* or, if you're on a mac, something even more annoying.
*It's freakin' 2009. netbooks have 2GB of ram. Why the 'F does the page have to reload when I hit the back button, or two pages reload if I did so accidentally and hit the forward button immediately thereafter. Why aren't the fully rendered pages cached for several levels of back-ed-ness? (determined by some algorithm relating to the available RAM, to balance off use against the filesystem cache) If I need to reload, F5 is right there on the keyboard. My main use of tabs at the moment is because "back" is not implemented properly on any of the browsers I use.
It seems I have a lot of anger.
Re:Oh yeah? (Score:2, Insightful)
HealBot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Insightful)
"Why aren't the fully rendered pages cached for several levels of back-ed-ness"
Because then people will claim your browser has a memory leak.
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:1, Insightful)
not to mention semantics of HTTP