drucker.ca

For decades there was a reli­gious war regard­ing what com­puter users should be doing with their hands when they weren’t typ­ing. No, not that reli­gious war (you cheeky mon­key!), the one about the point­ing device, which would allow a user to make ges­tures on the screen, and address parts of a graphic user inter­face. Before I even started using a com­puter, I imag­ined that I’d be using some sort of ‘light pen’ to do Music Nota­tion on the screen, since I’d once seen some­one using that kind of a device on a doc­u­men­tary (and wasn’t it used in the movie The Androm­eda Strain)?  Then, when I was just return­ing to the US from school in Eng­land, a fel­low stu­dent (who was Cana­dian) said I should look into using ‘A Moose’. No, I mis­heard his Toronto accent. He wasn’t talk­ing about the Cana­dian ani­mal, but the Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie of Robert Burns fame A Mouse. The orig­i­nal, first com­puter mouse, invented by Dou­glas Engle­bart in 1963 had this draw­ing in the patent:

Though the draw­ing doesn’t show it, Englebart’s mouse, which was one small part of Engelbart’s a larger project, aimed at ‘aug­ment­ing human intel­lect’ had 1 but­ton. The draw­ing mainly shows how the block uses mul­ti­ple rollers, which sense which way the mouse is being moved in terms of X and Y coordinates.

When Apple shipped the first Lisa com­puter (and of course, the first Mac) , the com­mand­ment that ‘Thy mouse shall have but  1 but­ton’ was spo­ken to the masses. On the other side, the X-Window Sys­tem, and the IBM PC mouse had mul­ti­ple but­tons (2 or 3). The two to three camps dug in for years, each claim­ing the ergonomic, moral or prac­ti­cal high ground over the oth­ers. The antipa­thy between the 1 or many but­tons groups con­tin­ues to to this day, even if this divi­sion is no longer the case. Many peo­ple believe that Apple has stayed true to their gospel and only makes or sup­ports a 1 but­ton mouse, but the unforut­nately named ‘Mighty Mouse’, which shipped in 2005, sup­ports mul­ti­ple but­tons vir­tu­ally rather than phys­i­cally (you click on one side or other other to sim­u­late one or the other but­ton), and also has a roller ball and 2 phys­i­cal side but­tons, pro­vid­ing no fewer than 5 but­tons. The pro­lif­er­a­tion of mouse but­tons, some­times 2, some­times 3, some­times 5 or more, depends on the sys­tem and soft­ware one encoun­ters. Some track­ball devices have had 5 but­tons that effec­tively pro­vide even more con­trol mes­sages by allow­ing a dif­fer­ent kind of click from dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of those but­tons. Apple’s lat­est mouse (the even more unfor­tu­nately named ‘Magic Mouse’ — what group is com­ing up with these names?) even goes far­ther, mak­ing the entire mouse sur­face another con­trol sur­face in and of itself, like the track­pad on a lap­top. This, to me, is akin to attach­ing a steer­ing wheel to the top of a gearshift, or some other bizarre com­pos­ite, but I’ll have to with­hold judge­ment until I try one, even though it sounds like the Indus­trial Design equiv­a­lent of a Tur­ducken.

The point is, com­plex ges­tural move­ments, involv­ing more than a sim­ple click (or dou­ble click) on a point­ing device have pretty much been adopted by all com­puter mak­ers, with at least an accepted level of com­plex­ity, although for the most part, a user can work up to that com­plex­ity, by mov­ing from sim­ple ges­tures to more com­plex ones over time, hence the idea of a short cut to a func­tion instead of mak­ing  that func­tion only exe­cutable from a com­plex gesture.

As a friend of my par­ents puts it, ‘Any­thing worth doing is worth over­do­ing’. I shouldn’t be sur­prised by what I thought was cer­tainly a post on The Onion, but no, it was seri­ous, and it was the Open Office Con­sor­tium who was propos­ing this mouse:

The Open Office Mouse. Really. No, really.

Holy Roller, Bat­man! This thing is cer­tainly the other end of the spec­trum from the mice we’ve seen up until this point, at least for the gen­eral pub­lic. (More com­pli­cated mice like this one have shown up on engi­neer­ing sta­tions, imag­ing sys­tems, and count­less other ver­ti­cal appli­ca­tion machinery).

If you look care­fully (click on the photo to see it a bit larger), you’ll see that it has no fewer than 16 but­tons and a roller that are vis­i­ble. The descrip­tion actu­ally boasts that it has “18 pro­gram­ma­ble mouse but­tons with double-click func­tion­al­ity” and “Three dif­fer­ent but­ton modes: Key, Key­press, and Macro”.  They even show a com­par­i­son chart com­par­ing it to other mice on the market.

While I won’t com­ment on the odd­ness of an open soft­ware con­sor­tium design­ing hard­ware (or rather, hav­ing a designer design some for them), I have to admit that this ini­tial para­graph, on the page ‘About the OpenOf­fice­Mouse, caught my attention:

The OpenOf­fice­Mouse was designed with the goal of being the best and most use­ful mouse the dig­i­tal world has seen to date. Ini­tially inspired by the key­boards on the Treo smart­phones, it was designed by a game designer who was annoyed with the pal­try num­ber of but­tons avail­able on high-end gam­ing mice. Because gam­ing mice have his­tor­i­cally been designed pri­mar­ily for FPS¹ games, not MMO² and RTS³ games, they do not pos­sess suf­fi­cient but­tons for the dozens of com­mands, actions and spells that are required in games that make heavy use of icon bars and pull-down menus. After dis­cov­er­ing that the avail­able World of War­craft mice were noth­ing more than reg­u­lar two-button mice dec­o­rated with orcs, dwarves, and Night elves, the idea of the War­Mouse was born. After much exper­i­men­ta­tion, it was deter­mined that 16 but­tons divided into two 8-button halves were the max­i­mum num­ber of but­tons that could be effi­ciently used by feel alone. How­ever, in the process of design and devel­op­ment, it quickly became appar­ent that many non-gaming appli­ca­tions would also ben­e­fit from hav­ing dozens of com­mands acces­si­ble directly from the mouse, espe­cially appli­ca­tions with nested pull-down menus and hotkey com­bi­na­tions. OpenOffice.org was selected as the ideal appli­ca­tion suite around which to design this appli­ca­tion mouse because the usage track­ing fea­ture of OpenOffice.org 3.1 per­mit­ted the assign­ment of appli­ca­tion com­mands to mouse but­tons based on the data gath­ered from more than 600 mil­lion actual mouse and key­stroke com­mands enacted by users. The OpenOf­fice­Mouse team are advo­cates of Free and Open Source Soft­ware, which is why we are mem­bers of the OpenOffice.org com­mu­nity and have cre­ated cus­tom pro­files for other OSS appli­ca­tions such as Mozilla Fire­fox, Mozilla Thun­der­bird, The Bat­tle for Wes­noth, D-Fend Reloaded, and The Gnu Image Manip­u­la­tion Program.

So what we have here is a design for a gam­ing mouse, now re-purposed for gen­eral pur­pose appli­ca­tions (like brows­ing the web, email, and the Open/MS Office suite of word pro­cess­ing, spread­sheets and presentations).

Maybe it’s because I don’t do much gam­ing (and by ‘don’t do much’,  I mean hardly at all),  maybe it’s because I come from the ‘make it for a klutz’ school of UI design because I’m not very coor­di­nated, but I think that this approach to User Inter­face or Indus­trial Design will never have much of a fol­low­ing. It wasn’t lost on me that I had to look up some of those acronyms to pro­vide the foot­notes here. Sure, there will always be some small group of peo­ple who want more and more direct power over their work from their hard­ware, and they often buy the most baroque con­trol devices. For me, how­ever, the whole idea of tak­ing a piece of gam­ing hard­ware and repur­pos­ing it to work on every­day tasks is about as appeal­ing as using a flight sim­u­la­tor to do your bank­ing. Sure, you might get more fine maneu­ver­abil­ity dur­ing a funds trans­fer (if you could mas­ter the con­trols), but it hardly seems worth the effort. Maybe that’s the key here: Hav­ing a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage from  your hard­ware and your skill with it dur­ing a game is far more impor­tant and more likely to have you make that effort than being a whiz at mov­ing from cell to cell in your spread­sheet or even trig­ger­ing one of the 100 or so macros you’ve cre­ated for your word pro­cess­ing tasks.

So to the OpenOf­fice­Mouse folks, I say, good luck, but for­get about sell­ing one of those mice to me. Now, we start see­ing the ‘direct to brain’ con­trollers, where I don’t have involve my arms and fin­gers at all with typ­ing and ges­tur­ing on the screen but just think where I want to the cur­sor to go, I’ll be more inter­ested. That would be the 0 but­ton mouse, which I think I’m going to have to address in some future post.

¹first-person shooter
²mas­sively mul­ti­player online
³real-time strategy