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Non-Apple Buttonless Mouse
MX pointed us to a story about a
new buttonless mouse. It's visually quite unique, but they say it's not the ideal gaming device for you real-time-gaming folks. But hey, points for style. I've been using this
optical cordless logitech (Blatant ThinkGeek linkage) on my desktop for awhile, although I'm not sure how well it'd work for gaming. When I play, I still use a MS Optical mouse. Whatever anyone thinks about their business practices and operating systems, they sure seem to always sell good mice.
This seems like it would be good for implementing a targeting system in say tank simulations. Where you can move the mouse to move the tank, and move your hand on the mouse to move the turret. Also good for 3d modeling as they say
Photos.
Whatever anyone thinks about their business practices and operating systems, they sure seem to always sell good mice.
I replaced the hideous 'pebble' supplied with my iMac with an MS optical wheel mouse, it's probably the best £30 I've spent on computing kit.
The Classic MacOS drivers for the extra button and scrolly wheel work without incident and MacOSX has support built in.
Apple's buttonless, (beautiful), optical mouse has been great for me. They say Macs are more productive computers because of the user interface.. I agree.. but I must admit I wasted a lot of time originally just looking at this thing.. it's weird.. the inside of it appears to "float". You can't tell this in pictures but in 'real life' it seems to float. It reminds me of mercury actually, in a sense. The Apple logo inside, especially, floats within it. It's a really great mouse.. and it's connected to a G4 tower, so that ain't bad either!
Wow, I'm talking about *nothing* and I've still developed a paragraph! Much like my english papers. I'm done now...
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
So I agree with Taco - MS can make a sweet mouse.
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I would say that the real reason for this is not the inherent superiority of ball mice for gaming but the fact that most very serious (ie Pro and near Pro) gamers learned to play on ball mice. Since the two do feel different, they do not switch for fear of losing some of their edge. Wait for the day when almost all mice are optical - there will be a generation of Pro gamers using them (unless something better comes along first).
You can 'click' the mousewheel. Acts as a perfect 3rd button if you change it in the IntelliPoint software. I'll agree with Taco as well -- MS Mice Rox0r!
Thanks,
--
Matt
There is the genuine issue that your parent message brought up - the sampling rate on optical mice is too low to adequately map the expected motions to interpreted motions, and hence the human user performs operations that the hardware does not interpret as the human expected or anticipated.
;)
The obvious consequence of this is a sharp flick to the right or left which leads to a Quake 3 character staring at the ground for no apparent reason, and subsequent death and loss of the competition. This can be compensated for with extremely, and I mean extremely, high sensitivity, in the order such that 0.5 cm corresponds to your screen resolution in terms of a desktop.
However, that being said, the human user does not have the physical coordination to operate at that level. As such, until optical resolutions are significantly higher, users of track balls and ball mice will have superior granularity and better correspondence between the expected behavior of the hardware and the actual behaviour of the hardware, irregardless of the skill, training, and habits of the users.
The advantage is in the correspondence between expected behaviour and actual behaviour, it being much better with track balls and ball mice (which are optical, but in a different way) than it is with optical mice.
(Just a note - have a look at trackball patterns; it is not a uniform pattern but a miss-mash pattern with form following function)
Having been one of, and knowing some of, the better Unreal Tournament players in my time, the differences, in not playability but infinitisemal advantages that lead to domination over a long enough time period, are well known and examined. Optical mice do not require a very long time period to assert their inferiority.
You truly have no idea what YOU are talking about. The new MS optical mouse is decent. Have you ever attended quake tournaments? Lets see I attend and compete at them regularly. A few people, as in not many at all, have swapped over to the 3.0. Most still play with the ball mice and the ones that did swap to the 3.0 typically used opticals before. To further explain, the ones that used opticals to play generally have very high sensitivity settings. So long or fast movements with the mouse aren't all that necessary. Otherwise almost everyone without super high sensitivities use ball mice.
More importantly Microsoft mice are overpriced turds. I can't believe all the people in here praising it. If you just read through some of the posts right now you can see how many people have said they've had them break, yet they were happy to get replacements everytime. These mice shouldn't break within two or three years. The teflon feet on Microsoft mouse are pitiful is well. After some hardcore gaming you can fully wear them out in half a year, which really affects the movement. Microsofts in particular do have shoddy construction. A pathetic plastic shell, with no feeling/weight, and a poor shape when compared to logitechs.
You are clueless and apparently most people in here have not been accustomed to pro gaming. Unless of course they are playing counterstrike. Opticals are used there often, because moving the mouse isn't really required to play that game.
Obviously I haven't used one, but I don't see what problem they're trying to solve with this leaning instead of clicking thing... it seems to me that that would be even worse for your wrist after repetitive use, and judging from the other mice on the companies website, they're not exactly masters of ergonomics or industrial design.
This does bring up a question I've wondered about, though; if Apple offers their own 2-button scroll wheel mouse, what will it look like. The last time we heard rumors that they were designing one was back during the days of their hockey-puck mouse, so the mouse would have had the fruit and ice design scheme. I must say Apple's current no button clickable mouse is beautiful, even though I use my Logitech Cordless Optical Mouse most of the time, I keep it on my desk for the prettiness factor (the Logitech isn't bad though, it almost perfectly matches the colors of a graphite G4 tower, it just can't hold a candle to a translucent black oval floating above your desk ;).
Of course, there's no guarantee Apple will ever make a two-button mouse, but I don't think you can rule out the possibility that they might start at least including them with Power Macs. Apple has admitted that many of their customers need the extra button and scroll wheel, particularly gamers; when Apple furnished Power Macs for QuakeCon, they came with 3rd party two button mice, and you'll wonder how you ever used the Mac OS X Finder with a one-button mouse once you switch.
So I think there is plenty of motivation, although they would probably keep the present mouse on the iMacs (the iMacs now actually use a special mouse with a white bubble instead of a black one, ditto for the keyboard). So my question is what would it look like? Hopefully nothing like this one from Green, in form or function, but how do you make a mouse as stunning as the current one with buttons and a scroll wheel breaking up the design? Would be a very different design, but the new towers might see a very new design sometime soon as well, and they might take that opportunity to switch keyboard and mouse designs ont the pro products as well, after all, is Apple going to use the same style they've had since the G3 when they start making 5th gen towers.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
I would have to disagree due to the fact that I've previously owned an MS Intellimouse Optical. As far as playing q3a went, the mouse jumped here and there, especially annoying when trying to frag. The funny thing was that I always kept my mouse drivers up to date and I still continued to have this problem with the MS Intellimouse Optical. Thats when I decided to trash the MS mouse and go for a Logitech Dual Optical. Now this Dual Optical mouse is the ideal mouse for any of you FPS fans, since if one laser fails to track, the other laser picks up where the other one stopped tracking. I personally like Logitech's Dual Optical as far as optical mice are concerned. And As far as the smooth surfaces go, the Logitech is also alot smoother, and also seems to be more ergonomically correct for my hand. But I guess it all really boils down to personal preference, so get whatever floats your boat!
If I really need to scroll far. I'll just use the scroll bar.
I find it no more unatural than moving the cursor over to the scroll bar, or uisng the page down key.
What kind of mouse did you have? The MS one I have, has a very easy to turn wheel. I have noticed that some are quite clicky/sticky/hard. And I could understand getting CTS if you were using one of them.
My only complaint about the MS Explorer mouse is that it's too damn bulky. It's not something I realised untill I started to use it. I never used to rest my hand on the mouse. Just grip it with my fingers. The ergonomics can get in the way some times because they must expect you to rest your whole hand on it.
Speak for yourself. I have the logitech cordless optical that taco was talking about, and it's fantastic. I had to turn the sensitivity way down because it is so fine-grained, whereas with my ms mouse I had to turn it way up. it never jumps on me, and the resolution is fantastic. I bought some rechargable NiMH batteries, and I have to say that with those it's almost the perfect mouse. The only problem I have with it is that the buttons are too close together, so I can't have 3 fingers on top. but since I usually only use the wheel for reload/zoom/changing weapons, and that in linux the thumb button also maps to B3, it's great.