Apple's Buttonless Mouse Came From Steve Jobs' Misunderstanding | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Buttonless Mouse Came From Steve Jobs' Misunderstanding

minyanville.com

83 pointsbuza86 comments

> The Pro Mouse also ditched the dust-collecting ball underneath a standard mouse in favor of an LED for fully solid-state optical tracking. "As far as I'm aware, we were the first consumer company to do that," Farag said.

Sorry, but no. From wikipedia: "The first modern optical computer mice were the Microsoft IntelliMouse with IntelliEye and IntelliMouse Explorer, introduced in 1999 using technology developed by Hewlett-Packard." Also, the Intellimouse Explorer is a legendary mouse which deserves its own article. I still own two of them and use one daily (3.0 version).

I have a working v1.0 Intellimouse Explorer that I still use. I bought it my freshman year of college (1999), and it's by far the oldest piece of electronics on my desk. Replaced the cord once (took apart a microsoft gamepad that had the same connector), but that's about it. I never understood why they made the side buttons smaller in the later revisions.

Yeah.

But even Wikipedia got it wrong. Sun had optical mice in the 1980's and you could get a version for the PC from Hewlett Packard in 1997 that used an IR sensor.

This paper talks about the history of mice, and mentions that optical mice started in 1981. (though they required a special mouse pad) http://genevalunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/145378.pdf

I remember using one of those mid nineties - I think is was a Sun workstation. It had a metallic mouse pad with a grid pattern etched into it.

Yeah, we had these Sun ones in the lab at university back in '96(ish). They'd probably been there a few years even then.

'Course they were reliant on the special mat, and the mat had to be oriented correctly. I suppose you might say they weren't really a consumer offering though, which the article mentions. The price of Sun systems kept them in business ajd education facilities.

I'm guessing that's what the Wikipedia article means by "modern": able to work on most any surface, not just a special mat.

According to http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/xerox/star8010.shtml Xerox had an optical mouse in 1981, I know for sure it had one in 1985 because that was when I was using them.

There were three button optical mice on many SGI workstations too, if I recall

The Intellimouse Trackball V1.0 is fantastic too - only trackball I've ever seen that lets you use your index and middle fingers for the ball, your thumb for the buttons, and your ring finger for the wheel. I wish someone would make a usb, optical version of that.

I use a Kensington Expert Mouse (it's actually an optical trackball, despite the name) which fits very well with the finger arrangement you describe. I use my little finger for the right button, though; I don't know if that's a deal breaker for you.

http://www.kensington.com/kensington/us/us/p/1444/K64325/exp...

> While there are many users, gamers in particular, who shy away from Apple's buttonless offerings

Many? I have yet to come across a single person who likes any of the Mighty Mouse models that Apple produced. They are all reviled and considered some of the worst mice that were ever created by a hardware company.

Steve Jobs was no genius, he got a few things very right and quite a few others very, very wrong.

Are you suggesting a genius would not make mistakes?

I'd neither suggest that, or that Jobs was one.

He was both very very smart, very very lucky, and good fortune to know to get it right on the first time - even if the first time wasn't the right time for the product (see NeXT)

So what does it take to be a genius then? If Einstein had been born in the middle ages would he still be remembered as a genius?

> So what does it take to be a genius then?

A genius is a person who is capable of incredible leaps of understanding and originality. That's difficult to measure so we recognise geniuses through the work they achieved...the theory of evolution marks Darwin as a genius, and relativity does the same for Einstein. Jobs may well have been a genius, but his achievements aren't at the level most people think of as genius.

In other words: "I don't know but I'll tell you when I see one."

That's the problem with these sorts of definitions. It's nearly impossible for anyone to agree on the edge cases.

We use computers all the time. For the average consumer, that mouse is pretty nice. I don't mind using mine when I'm surfing or just doing email. Editing text and doing Photoshop with the Mighty Mouse is hideous. I use a Logitech Anywhere MX - the thing will track on glass.

I edit text all the time with a Mighty Mouse and find it fine. What do you find hideous about it?

From my limited use of it: clicking with it--since the whole body clicks--moves the cursor out of place, such that I lose precision clicking. The scroll ball is atrocious. It gets dirty and loses function, and it's not easy to clean.

I goofed. I use a Magic Mouse, not a Mighty Mouse.

I work at a place with about 10-20 Macs. The batteries die faster than I can replace them. I get about 20 batteries per month and we churn through them. I gave up trying to get people to turn them off, put them all in a draw and a helpful colleague replaced all with el cheapo MS corded mice. Much better.

Any functionality that provides scrolling or zooming is completely whacked with it. Google Maps, for example.

I kind of like the Magic Mouse. It basically gives me a built-in trackball and inertial scrolling, something I've wanted in a mouse for many years. It's too bad the ergonomics really suck, and that not having a dedicated right mouse button makes it completely unusable in some cases. (Games?)

I find the mouse forces you to hold it at a slant, very different to the demo videos you'll find in System Preferences for the mouse. The right-click functionality is there, but it's hidden and the stiff nature of the protective shell means if you right-click on the far far far right of the mouse, the left click actually gets engaged.

Not a great design. I might dig out the Belkin bluetooth mouse instead.

A bunch of recent Logitech mouses feature an unlockable "free spin" wheel. Basically, you can "lock" the scroll wheel and then it functions as a notched, precise operation for small adjustments. Alternatively, you can "unlock" it and then it scrolls very smoothly and nearly forever. Ideal when you want to move across a large document. It's hard to describe and they do it better at [1].

I would really encourage you to try one mouse with that function. You could be very pleasantly surprised :)

[1] http://xahlee.info/kbd/mouse_with_spinning_flywheel.html

I really like the idea of those Logitech mice, but having briefly used one, I find that the flywheel mechanism really compromises the middle click. The Magic Mouse also has the advantage of being able to scroll in any direction, which is far more useful than you might think. Finally, it's just nice to have a device that has a minimum of mechanical parts; I feel a lot more confident dropping my Magic Mouse on the floor, since there's not a lot in there that can break.

Given the hardware capabilities from Apple systems, I doubt real gamers will care for the systems anyway.

At least that is one of the reasons I am yet to buy one.

The hardware is great but the developers don't care about the platform for games. Many of the games you'll see for Mac are from films that Pixar did (Wall-E, the Incredibles).

And Homeworld 2, but only on OLD OLD systems. This makes me sad.

Sorry but if I compare what GPUs Apple systems have with what I can get for the same price for other systems, it is not that great.

When measuring available video RAM, shader levels and OpenGL version support, Apple systems don't fare that well.

Each of us has different set of use cases when buying a computer.

On my case the CPU/GPU combo vs cost is the number one.

Ah I see your point. They have made the move to non-discrete graphics for their Mac Mini systems as Intel's offerings have improved significantly, but my MacBook has an nVidia 650M in it I think, which does me alright when I reboot to Windows on it.

But then again, I am not really playing modern games so am not really stressing it that much; (having said that, the fans do go mental in it).

I wonder whether it is a vicious circle for gaming on the Mac? Nobody buys a Mac to game on because there's no games on the platform, so developers don't write for Macs because nobody plays games on them etc. etc. etc.

Steve Jobs was a genius, but he wasn't the tech god that he's lionised as.

He didn't get anything wrong. Many people prefer form over function (look at all the 'designer' kitchen utensils) and this was also Steve Jobs' design philosophy.

>He didn't get anything wrong. Seriously? I wouldn't say this about anyone.

I used the MightyMouse for a while, for work and didn't mind it.

There were occasionally misfires with the left/right capacitive sensors, for example if you left your right finger on the mouse while depressing the left finger. This would not work for gamers at all, and they were the most vitriolic in their disdain for this mouse.

This was one of the first mice that I was aware of that properly implemented left/right scrolling, which I used very often. It was also a decent mouse to throw in your laptop bag, as it had a door to prevent junk from getting into the optical sensor and doubled as a power switch, used built-in wireless, and took AAs. I never used the squeeze function, however... When then Magic Mouse came out, I switched to that, and still use it.

Interesting trivia: this mouse had a built in speaker, which is what generated the auditory feedback for scrolling the wheel. Very odd...

This reminds me of how when Apple created the UI for the Lisa (and then the Mac), they thought that on the original Xerox Alto, windows could overlap, so Quickdraw had to handle overlapping windows [0]: “Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front.”

I thought I read somewhere that Jobs specifically asked for this, (mis)remembering having seen it at PARC, but I cannot find the quote at the moment.

[0] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

There are a few stories that follow this pattern... my favorite is the one about Starcraft development. While Blizzard was making nothing more than "Warcraft in space", a competing studio showed a beautiful and fluid RTS at trade shows that got everyone's attention. The Starcraft team had a hard time getting their product to the same level, and had to scrap a lot of code. It turned out that the other studio was just showing prerecorded videos at trade shows, while employees mimed the appropriate button presses to make it look interactive.

It was Dominion: Storm over Gift 3, from Ion Storm.

http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-d...

I expected to read an article about how awful the Magic Mouse is, since I don't like the current Apple offerings of mice—at all. I find them poorly fitting and quirky (holding a mouse with just the tips of my fingers doesn't work for me). OTOH, I love their trackpads and find any other laptop trackpad almost impossibly insensitive and powerless.

I, however, really enjoyed their previous mouse offerings. So I was glad to see innovation happens the old fashioned way. An "Oops." An "Oh wait…" Then a "This is genius!"

Edit: grammar.

I fully agree, and I think that's the common opinion as well. Their laptop touchpads are above all others, but I can't stand using a Magic Mouse for more than even a second.

I've been using Logitech mice (G5 and later G500) for many years, and they're far more ergonomic.

The article/interviewee suggests it was the first mainstream optical mouse, launched in 2000. Didn't the Intellimouse have it around 1999, plus a scrollwheel? I remember using a range of Microsoft mice going back many years and they were pretty well known.

Actually, the Wheel Mouse Optical I still use today is from late-2000, I think. For a while in the middle, I used one of the darker grey Explorers before returning to the lighter and older version.

Anyone else remember round/puck mice from before that Apple one, mid-1990s? First encountered that shape of mouse in a Unix lab.

I to this day still use the IntelliMouse. They are hard to find at times and I found someone on Alibaba selling knock-offs I've been real tempted to try.

Yep. I'm using an intellimouse from c.a. 2001 as my main pointing device. It's a 5 button + wheel, usb/ps2 version. I've also got a simpler 3 button + wheel one, but it's newer, and doesn't feel as nice.

Mouse Systems, Steve Kirsch's company, was shipping optical mice in 1982. They were standard issue on Sun workstations for years. I leave it to your judgment whether that qualifies as "mainstream".

I remember Sun's mice. You needed a special mouse pad with a grid layout printed on it.

Are those the ones that needed special metal mousepads? Those were rad. My dad had one for drafting.

yes, they are.

My first mouse was a Mouse Systems serial mouse - in my 286 - today I picked up a NIB PS/2 Mouse Systems mouse with pad.

Mainstream is debatable, yes, but the quote used the word consumer, which Sun definitely wasn't.

A Sun 360 deskside computer was definitely consumer, it was only the size of a filing cabinet (definitely made for nuclear war though, heavily shielded).

The Mouse Systems optical mice were available for other, consumer, platforms as well. We had a Mouse Systems optical mouse (with the metal grid mousepad) for our Mac Classic in the early 90's.

It's difficult to find the history of the IntelliMouse, but it looked like the original one launched around 1998 had the scrollwheel and a mouse ball, but the second generation one has the optical addition. Not sure when it launched though. According to this site: http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/microsoft/ it's around 1999. But there is no attribution or month listed. This was for the 1.0 version though, that was quickly discontinued. 1.1A launched as a minor hardware revision later, and the first reliable one seems to be the 3.0 from forum posts on the subject, which dropped around 2001-2002.

The history of the Apple Pro Mouse is super-easy to find though, it launched in July 2000. So sayeth Apple-History and MacTracker. Looks like MS was first to market but with a fairly flaky original and refined it on the market.

It might have been the IntelliMouse Explorer, with the red bottom and LED.

Optical Intellimouse came out in 1999 -

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/1999/apr99/eyepr.a...

DEC used three button puck-style mice, the one you saw was likely attached to a DECStation and I think DEC had been using them for quite a while, maybe from the mid to late 80s. Here's logitech's first mouse from 1982 which is also a puck.

http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/logitech/p4.shtml

I had that original Intellimouse, and it was definitely 1999. I had a G3 minitower and USB was still the new hotness. I actually had to buy a USB card to stick in my G3. I also got myself one Gravis Gamepad Pro controllers at the same time. USB Overdrive got a hell of a workout back then.

Apple mice are comically frustrating to use. I'd rather carry around a mouse of my own than use one of those pieces of crap.

Edit: even more funny is the "Magic" Trackpad. Watching people mouse around on big desktop monitors at the speed of molasses with one of those always cracks me up. The only "magic" in it is that it makes any mouse-intensive work take twice as long to complete.

I love my trackpad. You don't know what you're talking about. This is just another opportunity for you to shit post Apple.

I have one and love it as well. A giant modern trackpad in all its gesture-interface glory is a pretty awesome experience. I still like to use a mouse for precise tasks, but for web browsing, documentation reading, and general use.. it really can't be beaten.

What does it do that a mouse can't?

Multitouch gestures are like keyboard shortcuts that you can activate without having to take your hand off the mouse. An expanded set of gestures such as provided by jitouch is extremely powerful.

There is software[1] available for mouse gestures, although it appears that it's third party and hasn't been updated in some time. Firefox has some very nice add-ons that do mouse gestures as well. For X11, there's Easystroke.

[1] http://briankendall.net/xGestures/

The "all-in-one gestures" Firefox add-on is the #1 reason why I use it as my main browser. Chrome doesn't have any decent gesture add-on (they even removed things like scrolling through tabs with the mouse wheel...).

I've looked at the gestures documented by Apple on their site and I didn't see anything that couldn't possibly be done better with a mouse and a mouse wheel (and decent software).

Apple's defaults for cursor speed have always been really slow, which is sad because their trackpads are some of the few that are precise and accurate enough to work well with high sensitivity settings.

Ya, I basically need to use my Magic Mouse while my MBP is plugged into an external monitor and I'm not using the trackpad.

Not having easy access to gestures slows me way down while working.

If I want to play a game in Bootcamp, I just use a standard two button mouse.

Nthed. It's not great for all use cases, and it feels a bit slow when you switch to it, but after a few minutes you'll be going almost as fast as with a normal mouse, but with much better ergonomics and with full access to gestures and inertial scrolling.

Try watching an experienced multi-button mouse user. They don't have to reposition their hand three times to cross the screen, or wait 300ms between every action for the gesture recognition algorithms to time out. Watching my coworkers pause all the time with their magic touchpads was very jarring for someone used to a more seamless flow of thought into action with a mouse. They probably don't even realize they are pausing, rather just subconsciously trained to avoid gestural misdetection by working more slowly.

And an experience trackpad user will have a ton of custom gestures set up, so half the time they don't even have to move the cursor around or resort to the keyboard.

I'm not sure how that trackpad was set, but I can jump across my MBP 15" diagonal with less than 2" of finger movement (more of a flick, really).

After a few weeks of using it, the trackpad and its gestures have become second nature and have made me more productive by effectively disappearing into the background. It doesn't feel like there's an interface between me and the cursor anymore. Of course, YMMV.

I can get to all four corners of my 27" monitor with my Apple trackpad, because the track speed varies with velocity. Flicking my finger 1" on the track surface moves the mouse a lot farther than slowly moving the same finger the same 1".

Track pads also allow gestures which greatly speed up app navigation and multitasking.

Most importantly, all my wrist problems went away when I got a trackpad because it's a more relaxed position for my hand, it requires little effort to use, and it works the extension muscles of my fingers.

It is fairly recent that Apple made the acceleration curves usable by default: classically Apple's cursors did not do this, and some people would seriously install Microsoft mouse drivers on their Macs specifically to get this acceleration behavior. It is highly likely that this person is talking about the situation from the last time he cared to evaluate Apple products, maybe five years ago (which frankly, I think is entirely fair for this thread's context).

I hate that macs have the mouse acceleration cranked up by default. Every time I have to show a coworker how to do something on his computer, I have to stifle the urge to throw his mouse across the room.

I use the magic trackpad on a 27" iMac, it is a wonderful input device and exactly fast enough. There are always clueless users who don't know to adjust tracking speed just like there are always clueless Apple haters who want to believe that Apple would not have provided a tracking speed preference control to allow users to tune devices to their needs.

I have tried many times to correct the mouse acceleration curve on OS X, including by installing 3rd party software. So it's much more likely that there are a lot of clueless Apple users out there who don't realize how unproductive they are with such a poorly designed input system.

Typical Apple anecdote.

Form over function? Check.

Enraged know it all CEO? Check.

Claiming it invented a mouse when it didn't? Check.

There are plenty of "crazy Steve Jobs" stories that make him look like a brilliant visionary. This is not one of those.

Haha true. It portrays him as arrogant.

If I worked with someone like that, I would find it grating. I did once apply to work at a helium balloon factory, and they offered me the job, but I wasn't going to be spoken to like that!

This looks like a rewrite of the 9to5Mac article for page views.

This one?

http://www.cultofmac.com/269222/steve-jobs-hated-idea-multi-...

Classic Steve. Form first, function if you have time later.

Classic Steve, calling people morons for no good reason.

>"What changed his mind was that he felt that users were finally ready to embrace an interface that had contextual menus and multiple buttons that did different things," Farag explained.

That was always the thing with Jobs. You would never see a feature until he felt that you were ready for it.

There are many technical people who hate the one-button mouse, but the design is perfect for users who are not comfortable with computers.

Furthermore, after years of reading contemptuous comments about this design, and now this article (and associated discussion), it must really have taken a genius to perceive something beyond the conceptual resistance (unconscious, even) of those surrounding him. It's the same process that leads to new paradigms.

Imagine that: making computers easy. Pffft.

Interesting read, but did anyone else find it annoying that the article didn't include any pictures of the 'zero button' mouse?

My first Apple was an MBP, so I don't know what the first Apple Pro Mouse looked like, turns out it was this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pro_Mouse

The article's title makes a daring statement. The possessive of a name ending in s usually uses 's:

James's Forbes's

Omitting the s after an apostrophe is usually reserved for historical or Biblical names (because historically they were pronounced the same as the bare word, as opposed to current pronunciation with the extra -ez sound):

Socrates' Moses' Jesus' Jobs' (?)

In the UK at least I believe we would stick with the second style every time.

edit: lowkeykiwi, you are hellbanned.

I was assuming American English, since the site is based in New York. Even so, it turns out there is a lot of nuance to this grammatical question. The Chicago Manual of Style (which is for book editing) prescribes 's, while the AP Stylebook and Libel Manual (for press, naturally) prescribes ' only.

So since it's an American news site and follows AP guidelines, the title is perfectly normal. Carry on.

When you've nailed so many things so right in your career, you tend to believe in your opinion even when you've got something totally wrong.

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