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.

Comments

Microsoft's mice

[stevie-boy]

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.

Lovin' Apple's

[piecewise]

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...

Re:MS mice

[baptiste]

I have to disagree. While I can't stand MS and the way they behave in the software arena, they can make awesome mice, keyboards, etc. How many of us would give up the wheel? The Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 is hands down the best mouse out there IMHO. It actaully fits my hand, is smooth over any surface, and just has a great 'feel' - plus it looks cool. But even something as plain as a keyboard - their keyboards are still very nice. I always thought shortcut keys on a keyboard were overkill, but now that I use them - I can't live without them (I switch between 2K and Linux and miss the keys when I'm in Linux)

So I agree with Taco - MS can make a sweet mouse.

Re:Mice and gaming.

[debrain]

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. ;)