Multi-Button OpenOfficeMouse At OOoCon 2009 265
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.
Re:Ahem (Score:2, Interesting)
Well Apple just did away with even the 1 button they had on their mouse, so this offering appears to be the opposite end of the spectrum.
Wonder which will a success and which will fail?
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:3, Interesting)
For instance, it's very difficult to find an encrypted, bluetooth, full-sized, optical, wheel mouse without side-buttons.
Keyboards I can understand, but why do you need to encrypt your mouse signal?
Re:Ahem (Score:3, Interesting)
I gave one a try just a couple of days ago.
The good:
The multitouch worked very well. It was very responsive for scrolling and left & right clicking was a breeze. The special mutlitouch motions they included were fun and easy.
The bad:
At this time the mouse doesn't support the pinch motion so no zooming in and out. NO MIDDLE CLICK!!! So if you use middle click to copy/paste into X11 apps this is gone. I did some googling, but I didn't have long with the mouse so I wanted to play as much as possible. I'd have to make sure I had a good solution for the middle click before buying though.
The other thing that was odd in the limited time I got to play, is that as you use the mouse it has a habit of twisting around on your mouse pad. I'd wonder why the mouse was going off at odd angles and then realize that my mouse was sideways again. I'm guessing that is something that would go away with some training and use.
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:3, Interesting)
Opera is excellent in this regard, and it's one of the reasons I use it. If you navigate back, not only will the page not have to refresh, but in nearly all cases, the page will be in the same state as it was left in after any Javascript had run on it. (Say, you clicked a couple of things and expanded some AJAX-y controls, the controls will still be expanded when you navigate back)
I *believe* that this even works after a restart->restore previous session, but honestly haven't experimented with it that much.
--Jeremy
Re:I call Shenanigans (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh no! They've put the WordPerfect 5.0 interface on a mouse!
A lot of people seem to forget that WP 5.x was fully menu and mouse-driven. The many keyboard shortcuts where for those who wanted to work fast without the slow downs of reaching out for the mouse. WP 5.x was faster and much more ergonomically sound too than modern word processors in that respect.
WP would never need a 18 button mouse, in fact it was fully functional without a mouse at all.
I still miss my WordPerfect 5.1 and the "reveal code" (Alt-F3) function.
--
Regards
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:3, Interesting)
They exist [dynamism.com]
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:3, Interesting)
Grandparent meant the bottom of the keyboard.
We know.
But the mouseball-on-keyboard is still a very nice idea. Compaq used to make a server keyboard with a mouseball. It lacked a keypad, for compactness. It was very functional, we who worked in the lab all loved that KB.
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.ideo.com/images/uploads/work/case-studies/large/Logitech_Cyberman2_cd.jpg [ideo.com]
Doesn't look like much, but man was it functional. You can do more with this, with less effort, than the X-Box controller ever dreamed of. But without adequate software support, it just doesn't work with very many programs.
I actually have one in the other room, but I didn't want to dig it out just to take a picture.