OpenOffice launches mouse with 18 buttons, 52 commands

http://openofficemouse.com/pr110609.html

by swombat • 17 years ago

58 52 17 years ago

openofficemouse.com

evdawg• 17 years ago

"The Mouse team have worked closely with experts from the OpenOffice.org User Experience project."

Ah. Well that explains it.

pierrefar• 17 years ago

Is 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• 17 years ago

It's a joke? -_-'

bdr• 17 years ago

They've found that almost everyone only uses two of the buttons -- but it's a different two for each person.

tjogin• 17 years ago

I guess that also means that almost everyone thinks sixteen of the buttons are just in the way.

wmf• 17 years ago

So it's a "long tail" mouse.

johnbender• 17 years ago

The c++ of mouses.

pbhjpbhj• 17 years ago

That'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• 17 years ago

I 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• 17 years ago

I 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• 17 years ago

I 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• 17 years ago

I 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• 17 years ago

It's like emacs for office users :)

gchpaco• 17 years ago

Only if you're expected to chord three or more buttons on a regular basis.

endtime• 17 years ago

With good software, this could be an interesting gaming mouse. Can't really picture using it for office work though.

chadaustin2• 17 years ago

Anyone 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_bleau2• 17 years ago

Do 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...

chadaustin2• 17 years ago

Hm, 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?

thegoleffect• 17 years ago

A little late or early for April Fool's? O_o.

MaysonL• 17 years ago

If 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• 17 years ago

The site seems to be slashdotted, here's a better link: http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/06/openofficemouse-isnt-free...

vollmond• 17 years ago

i 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• 17 years ago

The 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• 17 years ago

Oddly the site doesn't seem to mention if the mouse is compatible with Solaris or OpenSolaris.

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

Is this a joke?

roder• 17 years ago

yes

MikeCapone2• 17 years ago

If you had to ask, they've probably proven their point that there's something wrong with a lot of Open Source software :)

rbanffy3• 17 years ago

Oddly 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.

mattdawson• 17 years ago

FWIW (which may, admittedly, not be much), Gruber thinks it's not.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/11/06/openofficemouse

jamesbritt• 17 years ago

From the PDF: "PDF export of profile button assignments"

nrr• 17 years ago

My 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• 17 years ago

Well, it is probably a joke, but anyone familiar with Engelbart's mother of all demos would certanly see a vague similarity ...

jsz0• 17 years ago

It'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• 17 years ago

I actually want one.

Concours• 17 years ago

This 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!

cnicolaou• 17 years ago

It'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• 17 years ago

Thanks, but no thanks.

I'm still waiting for the Emacs mouse.

tspiteri• 17 years ago

Emacsers don't use the mouse! Unless it has enough keys we can do without a keyboard altogether, that is.

rlachenal• 17 years ago

Even if this turned out to be a real product, they'd probably just claim that it was just a joke now.

dw0rm• 17 years ago

lol, why not to release a full-feature QWERTY mouse :D

some1else• 17 years ago

I 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• 17 years ago

Somewhere now, S. jobs is having thoughts of approaching this mouse and pop out all buttons but one with a keyring :)

OpenOffice launches mouse with 18 buttons, 52 commands

Related Stories