WarMouse pushes gamers' buttons with OOMouse WarMouse plans to ship a multi-button office application mouse by February next year. The outfit said it would start taking orders for the pointing device, which comes loaded with 18 chunky programmable buttons and is intended for use by OpenOffice.org fans and gamers, next month. OOMouse features a shedload of inputs. The 18 …
That is the most ridiculous device I have ever seen... including Doug Engelbart's five-key "chorded" keyboard replacement idea from ca. 1972, which worked by typing binary ASCII codes — and which was downright simple-looking compared to that monstrosity!
"Let's see... to do function X I need to upper-centre-right-double-click".... why do I already have a migraine?
That's all "No". It looks shit, will probably feel shit and is has a wire. Urgh. Like their interface, this mouse looks like "Attack of the Worst of the 90s". They should spend less time feckin' around with crap like this and more time ironing all the simple, and bloody annoying, bugs in their software.
This post has been deleted by its author
It's not included and you don't have to buy it.
There is nothing wrong with a wire though.
Wireless mice are pointless waste of spectrum. I've had many problems with mouse over last 20 years, the wire isn't one of them.
I'd be surprised if this is popular. A tad too many buttons. but then I never use F1 to F12, Pause, Break, Scroll Lock, Sys Req on my keyboard.
Insert, Home, end rarely used.
The key the menu and key with a window are never used.
AEOHNRTS "left Shift" are starting to fade a bit on this 8 year old keyboard.
Why in the name of Satan and all his little imps (TM Blackadder) would I want a mouse with almost as many buttons as a keyboard? That really looks like an RSI special - you should be giving your mouse hand a break, not making even more tiny repetitive motions. Interesting opposing viewpoints though, an Apple mouse with 0 buttons (at least visually) and that thing with a lot. Think I'll stick to a penpad.
And far better by A4Tech: http://i1.lelong.com.my/UserImages/Items/0802/22/syslantech@13.jpg
Great to use though even then I could not be bothered to add in any additional button functionality because, fankly, it was not worth it. I can see some people may use more but this OO one is just ridiculous.
I just set one of the side buttons as PTT button in teamspeak back in the days when SWG was worth playing.
That looks bad. I can see why more buttons would be useful, but that looks terrible and doesn't appear to be very usable. Judging from the ridiculously high price, they don't expect to sell very many.
I think Sun should stick to designing server hardware, or should hire an external design team that know what they're doing. They took an excellent idea and did THAT with it :P
This reminds me of the 'nuts and bolts' system used by us aircraft-carriers to keep tabs on the aircraft on various parts of the ship (presuming that isn't just a urban myth); build something which does what it's supposed to and does it well, estetics can go f itself.
I don't know about using it in an office application where I'd imagine you would use the keyboard more than the mouse, but I'm sitting here wondering if I could use this with Photoshop, and how much time I could save by not having to go into the bloody menu for every option (clone this, paint over that, cut this, pipette that colour, burn that, etc).
Not to mention once I got used to it I would no longer need that pesky selection menu = more screen realestate for me to work on.
Seriously, give adobe a call and get support out of the box for this for their next iteration of their creative suite.
Jobbie, because a 1 button mouse is not a graphic designers best friend.
Peace.
Right where the palm of a left hander would be (Yes I do use a mouse left handed - right hand on keypad for spreadsheets.)
So I hope they are doing a left hander version.
Icon - well this is discrimination! I demand a left handed thumb up and thumb down icon!
After 27 years of computing my mouse hand is only a few years away from retrirement on the grounds of RSI and CTS. The latter is far worse than CTS and why I use a vertical mouse.
The OOMouse is hideous and for the sake of RSI and CTS should not be considered. As much as I love Sir Clive Sinclair why did they ask him to design it? (That was sarcasm)
"if you drew a venn diagram of those two groups you would find maybe one person who belongs to both."
Agree, totally different demographics, however that still leaves a huge group of people who will want the mouse to maximise the opporutnities of evangelising to people nearby about how much more productive they are with open source software, and another even bigger group who want to be able to select "attack opponent with turnip enema" and "jump while looking left" and reloading weapon at the same time without needing to take the hand off the mouse. In which case it could sell in some numbers, even if it does look like the lvoe child of a scroll mouse and a ZX80.
"And with just a click of the second button of the third row on the right hand side *click* I've switched to the oh, wait, sorry that only works in OODraw, let me just undo that with a *click* on the BUGGER!, no that was my fault, I knocked the joystick.. *click* and... *click* just a sec... *click* and there you go, rectangle tool selected!"
Not for a few years actually. Now I use Synergy+ over SSH.
And seeing as OOo is a desktop app, I don't see that you'd really be using this monstrosity of a pointing device in an area where you'd need a KVM, or where something like Synergy+ wouldn't actually be better.
My dislike of wired mice is my personal choice; you are free to have your own choice.
No need to get all upset about it.
The future of a mouse is one that doesn't need to rest on a surface at all, like the Philips Speechmike. The programmable buttons on mine with the scroll wheel, and controls for zoom, page back, and other stuff make working a computer as easy as watching TV and changing the channel!
...ridiculous. I remember a nine-button mouse was on the market sometime in the mid-90s; the manufacturer went bankrupt IIRC. Thing is, power users use keyboard shortcuts (especially when using the Creative Suite... honestly, I have no idea where in the menus most of the functions I use in InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator are; I hardly ever see the menus). An 18-button mouse is simply counterproductive in an production environment. Maybe it's something gamers can use; I wouldn't know: I tend to use the keyboard as my game controller...
Mine's the one with the tablet pen sticking out of the pocket.
pointless - gettit, coz its a mouse and it,... oh never mind
it's also stupid, i like multi-button mice, in fact i wish there were more on the market, well, some decently designed ones would be nice, but 18 buttons, and 'wired' !!! thats utterly stupid with a capitol STU. 7 or 8 buttons is the max you can have with ease of use and still keep it ergonomic and it must be wireless (does anyone use or even make corded mice anymore??). I like Open Office but guys c'mon, get your heads out of there, clearly it's too dark for you to see sense
I take it as a tacit acknowledgment of how many keystrokes it takes to do some fundamentally simple things in OO. Things like inserting the current date (Insert/Fields/Other/Filename/[Choose Format]/Insert/Close), or adding page numbers to documents which shouldn't require 10 mouse clicks. Things I could do 10 years ago in WordPerfect with 2-3 keystrokes require 15 minutes in OO. Not that its their fault, OO copied Microsoft's broken model.
Yeah, I know, I can spend hours configuring autocomplete to do all this for me, only to have it made incompatible and obsolete by the new version released a month later.
This is great. Never in my life have I seen a product this badly designed. And there are some bad ones out there but this really has to take the cake. I cant see how this can make "ANYTHING" faster in the office.
"Ok which button was select again? Was is button 1 row 1 or button 3 row 4? I cant bloody remember?"
I think it has enough buttons to write Japanese.a,i,e,u,o k,s,t,m,n,h,y,r,w confirm and - then the scrollie to pick script. You'd never need to use your wrist again lol.
As an aside, wired mice have their place, namely on all my computers becouse they're light, and work, all the time. Nice. I use a wireless keyboard but binned the mouse.
If it can do cool stuff like dissociate the mouse cursor from the typing cursor, so you can copy text from somewhere without losing your place and paste it at the current location (like pico in an xterm), it might not be so bad after all.
And I'd rather learn what several buttons do *once*, than have to select from a menu *every* time.
Amazing how conservative you folks are.
Yes, it looks ugly, but the way I see it, there should be at least as many buttons on a mouse as you have fingers. Any less is missing a trick.
Nobody is forcing anyone to buy this device, and let's face it, the scroll wheel is the first innovation in mouse design since Engelbart's 1968 original. (Why has nobody thought of making the ubiquitous office swivel chair into an input device?) Engelbart also devised several other 'no-brainers' including the ancestor of Endfield's Microwriter which have not caught on. Users were able to achieve extremely high typing speeds on those 'finger-chord' keyboards' ridiculed by 'Poor Coco' above, who clearly has no idea that they used a mnemonic finger pattern system, rather like sign-language, and not ascii codes. Once there was a good excuse why such innovations did not catch on (expense and lack of standards), but now we have USB.
BTW did anyone try the Oberon operating system? (Circa 1987). It used an ingenious 'chording' system with its three mouse buttons: Hold down one button while clicking another and you 'copy' the selection to the clipboard, for example. They also used up to four cursors. One for 'source parameter' one for 'target object', one for 'selecting' and one for 'execute'. It might not be the best design, but at least Wirth and co were thinking out of the box.
The mouse and the keyboard are the computer's primary 'sensory organs'. Should innovators not work to increase the bandwidth of their inputs? Increasing resolution of the motion sensors is one thing, but why not have pressure sensitive or velocity sensitive buttons? (256 levels of force? Dynamic Photoshop brush sizes? Wacom do this already and it's very, very cool). Imagine a keyboard where you could press harder for bold text etc.
There are many possibilities, but little real innovation. It doesn't help to have a gaggle of IT 'experts' who dismiss any attempt to design something new without actually trying it in their hands - which is what input devices ultimately stand or fall on.
If the OO mouse were the first of many design iterations, I think we would soon arrive at a really good input device. Yes, it looks absurd, but you have to start somewhere - and I think we are seeing the old cliché: innovators are invariably ridiculed until everyone realises the idea was always brilliant.
(How many here will admit to ridiculing the iPod because it lacked a radio? Well, I remember a vast clamour of voices with exactly that opinion. Yeah, I know... It was a long time ago, I never saw any Jews being mistreated... We didn't know what was going on... I can't really remember.... etc.)
I definitely use the 'home', 'page down' and 'page up' keys at least as much as I use the scroll wheel, probably more. Perhaps some of you minimalist/conservatives would rather have the scroll wheel on the keyboard too? Beside the page down' and 'page up' keys would be an 'obvious' place, no?
The real issue is the driver configuration software. Many logitech mice have 5 or more buttons, but the opportunities for configuring those buttons are ridiculously limited. Kensington mice have superb drivers, with finely tuned acceleration control and a proper macro editor but they seem to be going in Apple's direction of 'less is more' in their hardware designs.
So... why not TRY the device before leaping to any 'brilliant' and 'witty' conclusions.
How would you hold that? They said something like how the buttons were the same size as the buttons on a phone, but those work from your thumb, not your index, middle, and ring finger.
I thought it would have been fine if they moved the buttons all around, like pushing your palm down will set off one button, but even that seems sketchy.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
