OpenOffice launches mouse with 18 buttons, 52 commands | Hacker News Reader

OpenOffice launches mouse with 18 buttons, 52 commands

openofficemouse.com

58 pointsswombat52 comments

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

Ah. Well that explains it.

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.

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

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

So it's a "long tail" mouse.

The c++ of mouses.

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".

Is this a joke?

yes

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

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.

I don't really use Office very often, and when I do I find it to be a total rube golberg machine.

I figure that most people are just so used to it that they don't realize it anymore.

"Works like Windows" has been passing for "easy to use" for much too long. My 70-year-old mother migrated from MacOS 9 and Office 98 straight to Gnome without much complain and without any problem.

So where does Windows come in this picture? You have her going from Mac to Linux...

It doesn't. Ease of use has absolutely nothing to do with working like Windows. Unfortunately, that has been passed as the standard because so many users moving into other platforms do so from Windows.

That's because "Renaissance" will only make it in OpenOffice 3.3...

After the initial "people are terrified of change and will resist it" though, the ribbon turned out to be an improvement.

So when can I expect them to stop asking me where this or that function is hidden in Office __2007__.

As soon as you point them to the excellent interactive

Word 2003 to Word 2007 command reference guide

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/word/HA100744321033.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=904...

Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 command reference guide

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA101491511033.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=897...

PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007 command reference guide

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA101490761033....

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BEF...

Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007 Command Reference Guide

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102221621033.asp...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=CC3...

The first link is the online version, the second - the standalone .exe

I always put a shortcut to those above the shortcut of Word/Excel/Power./Outlook, explain/show how to use them in 5 sec and my users are happy!

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, but no thanks.

I'm still waiting for the Emacs mouse.

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

It's like emacs for office users :)

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

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 ;-}).

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."

It's a joke? -_-'

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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?

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...

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...

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?

Something like http://www.interworldna.com/images/summa/summa-cursors.jpg or http://www.interworldna.com/GTCO/gtco-ultima.php ? There's a lot of brands of these, they're called digitizers.

Found it--it's a Prohance Powermouse 70. Looks like it has the standard left/right buttons, plus 15 additional buttons. Normal config is F1-F10, plus esc, ctrl, user, fn, and enter. The driver allowed you to customize it for apps such as AutoCAD. Typical mechanical ball mouse guts, DE-9 serial connector. Actually pretty high quality, as you'd expect for a CAD peripheral back in the day.

Couldn't find an images online (I could take one if anyone is really interested), but I did see that someone was trying to reverse engineer the protocol: http://stuartl.longlandclan.yi.org/blog/2006/03/03/reverse-e...

chadaustin's mention of a custom mousing surface makes me think he was looking at a digitizer, although it could have been an old school optical mouse, such as the ones Sun used to use.

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

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

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?

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

I actually want one.

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

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