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Apple Applies For Rotary Mouse Patent
Dregs of Tar writes "According to an article at The Mac Observer, Apple has applied for a patent on an interesting new mouse idea. A rotary disc on the surface of the mouse can be pushed straight down as a mouse button, tilted forward or back to scroll vertically, and tilted side to side for horizontal scrolling. In other words, it's a rotary scroll wheel! Could it be so? Could we soon see Apple-branded, multibutton, scrolling mice?"
"Although not really a 'rotary disc'"
You answered your own question.
----- "Blame the guy who doesn't speak English." -- Homer J. Simpson
it can become very confusing for the computer illiterate crowd. Ever tried to explain the difference between left and right click ?
But for power users, it's a different story. I have a thumb button on my mouse that I programmed to be the ENTER key, and it's be hard for me now to do without.
My point is, how can you design a mouse that is universal and "upgradeable" at the same time ?
Apple's approach of the problem sounds interesting though, and raise a question about what will the future of pointing devices be.
Well I would think there are some rules for significant difference for a new patent for it to be considered a new invention. If not I guess someone can patent 'pink rotary disk' as a separate patent again from the original apple patent.
Sounds like a combination of a joystick [tilting] and conventional mouse [moving], just with the stick part removed.
There are a few PCS phones that use this type of button for navigation.
In a traditional wheel mouse, the wheel moves forward, backwards or down. This is more like a d-pad it can move forward, backwards, left, right, or down which is significantly different than any other scroll mouse I've ever seen.
This would be a great tool for AV editing... I'm thinking Jog Control /w mouse capabilities... New macs already come with a decent entry level suite of tools, why not adapt the input method to bolster your strengths...
now if they could just get it integrated with the Logitech 3D mouse, use two and a la Instant Minority Report Action!
--
While the new Apple patent sounds like a good idea, I have concerns that if Apple doesn't design that unusual button correctly you're going to end up with a lot of unintended screen scrolling.
Given that later releases of MacOS 9.x and the current MacOS X releases support the full functionality of the two-button mouse with scroll wheel natively (e.g., compatible with USB-port mouse pointers from Microsoft and Logitech), Apple should just "bite the bullet" and get Logitech to build a scrolling mouse that complements the shape of the current Power Macintosh boxes and iMac machines.
Radial discs for user input are not exactly a new idea; that said, they didn't take off in earlier incarnations.
Anybody remember Intellivision?
The #2 competitor to the Atari 2600, the Intellivision had a controller with a disc very similar to that described on this patent application (see the picture shown at the above link). The radial dial controller (along with a phone-like keypad and a couple 'action' buttons) was used rather than a joystick or a mouse.
The Intellivision controller is described at the bottom of this page, and the problems with it are aluded to in this video game history, notably that:
Unfortunately, the control discs are not a huge hit with players, along with the fact that their flimsy design leads to frequent controller breakdowns. Hardwired right into the system, this becomes a big problem for owners who have to slog the whole machine back to the dealer for repair.
I'd imagine Apple will avoid these mistakes; mice aren't integrated and I don't see why they can't insure higher quality. Personally, I found the disc an acceptable substitute for a joystick after playing with it a bit at a friend's house.
So I think there's a fair bit of prior art. I searched for 5 minutes for Intellivision and Coleco patents and found it described in
Patent 4,486,629, 4,470,012, 4,462,594, and 4,439,648. I didn't see that prior art cited in the Apple patent.
That said, the new patent does A) control scrolling actions rather than main-locus-of-control actions, and B) as the patent application says, "pressing down on the disc for clicking does not cause the disc to rotate" which seems like an advance to me over the Intellivision controller.
I guess the question comes down to: how well is the usability testing going?
--LP
P.S. For a Slash-based forum on post-PC UI issues, see Nooface.
Yeah, "Hold down this button over here on the keyboard, the one with the funny picture on it, and now, before you let go of it, you have to press the button over here on the mouse, and then you can let go of both" is much easier for a new user than "Press the button on the right side of the mouse."
Please, people, just see Apple for what they have become and where they'd like to go. The article is a good example. See the trees, they're all part of the orchard you're in.
Power users can tell such simple things apart, such as left and right click. I did tech support for sometime and still do for my parents and close family friends. Most of them are mid 40's to mid 50's and it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to get those people to use two fingers, one for each button and to tell which "click" to use. It is beyond aggravating. I'm sure plenty of other frustrated tech support types can sympathize with you as well bud.
-Daedalus
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
I don't think it is. I know what the title of the patent application says, but reading the description, it doesn't make sense that it's an actual dial like the iPod. The description says that the user can push it side to side or up and down. That's 4 directions. The iPod dial only goes in two directions. Up and down. (it's basically a scroll wheel turned on its side) To navigate "left" and "right", you use the other buttons on the iPod (Forward, back, etc). And it's certainly nothing like a telephone dial, which is spring loaded and can only go in one directon. I think it's more like a joystick, but instead of moving a handgrip, you move this round pad. Sony has something kind of like it on the remote for their home theater receivers. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
My poor brain is confused, and trying to read the patent application itself didn't help. It's rather dense. Nevertheless, paragraph 37 of it says . Note that this says horizontal or vertical. So that implies a rotary dial as a straight replacement for a wheel; OK, I can deal with that.
Paragraph 60. however, says and suddently it can do 2d scrolling, which a 1D wheel certainly can't. What gives? The diagrams page hates Galeon so I can't look at fig 10. Can someone shed light on this?
As for the ergonomics, I'm a little dubious. Isn't side-to-side motion of a finger actually quite bad for you? I though fingers had essentially one dimensional joints and were designed to move up and down and not much else. Roatating my finger in a 1-inch diameter circle feels a little uncomfortable to me. I do see their point about having to pick the finger up off a scroll wheel all the time, though; I've always had that problem with Sony jog dials, too.
You win again, gravity!
I think while the new Apple mouse design borrows some of the concepts from the Intellivision controller, I worry the disc will end up being too small in size (especially given Apple's penchant for building relatively small-sized mouse pointers), which will cause unintended scrolling, especially if you have big hands and/or fingers.
This isn't like the iPod, where the disc controller is fairly large and easy to manipulate even with larger-sized fingers.
First off let me remind you that this isn't an actual product. Nobody at Apple or anywhere else has stated that this is The Future Of Pointing Devices. Someone had an idea, made a prototype, legal got a patent Just In Case. That's how I read it.
It's a rotary dial
No, it's not. It's amazing how many Apple experts are in the slashdot house when a story pops up. The kind of experts that haven't used a Mac regularly since before the days of the Color Classic.
I'm sure all the apple zelots will crawl out of the woodwork to tell us why this is the greatest thing ever, and how having anything less would be like living in the stone age
I'm sure hundreds of ANTI-Apple zealots will crawl out of the woodwork to inform everyone that the iPod is "like a rotary dial phone." More of them will crawl out to mod the comment up as "+1 Informative." Another bunch will show up to make 1-button mouse jokes and then mod them up as "+1 Funny." One brave non-Mac user will publicly proclaim his desire to use OS X on his cheap-ass x86 box. It wil be immediately moderated up to "+5 Interesting" because so many of Windows/Linux users have OS envy.
The voices of the remaining seven people on slashdot who might have had something interesting to contribute to the discussion will be either a) drowned out completely or b) sucked into arguing with anti-Mac trolls. (Today, I'm the latter I guess.)
Such is the nature of front page Mac news at slashdot. (And why is this front-page news? You got me. Let's see if tomorrow's brand new music downloading service makes the front page. The success or failure of that initiative is going to make a lot of people stand up and take note. That'll be news.)
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
A patent from a high-tech company that isn't some lame attempt to steal ideas from the past and/or something that was so obvious to everyone else that no one ever thought to patent it. I am so friggin sick of patents that blatantly try to subvert progress in the name of ripping off the community that this one from Apple actually comes as a breath of fresh air. I have no idea how useful this device will be but at least it appears no one else has ever built one before.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
It's only fair to point out that the current design is widely disliked, that the only reason that it is still in place is because there's a few high-up die-hard UI people who were originally sold on the one-button mouse, and it's their baby (Jobs is one).
The point is that you should *not* have to run out and drop *more* money to get another peripheral to make your spangling new Mac not suck. Apple had a (tenuous) reason to not include a second button...up until they introduced context menus triggered by *control-clicking*. At this point, they're just being stupid. It's quite easy to have a one-button design and still include a clickable scroll wheel up front.
May we never see th
The point is that you should *not* have to run out and drop *more* money to get another peripheral to make your spangling new Mac not suck.
Ever order a computer from Dell? They'll toss in an el-cheapo mouse for free, or you can upgrade to a decent mouse for $40. Same difference here. Apple tosses in a mouse, or you can "upgrade" yourself at CompUSA. And you can even resell the Apple mouse of eBay.
Big fat hairy deal.
You make some excellent points. I've begun to think that general Macintosh opinion among the public lags about five years behind the reality. How many Mac users have heard non-Mac users rant about the fruit-colored iMac, a computer that's been out of production for years? On the other hand, even tech geeks in general are largely unaware of the BSD underpinnings or free iApps... all stuff that's come along largely since the advent of OS X and makes the Mac of greater value to geeks and casual users alike.
My guess is that in the year 2007 or 2008 the public will be saying "Did you know that Apple has a server box?" or "Did you know those new Apple laptops use 802.11g?" or "Hey, OS X shunts all the quartz compositing off to the video card! That's a neat idea".
I, for one, am tired of having to entertain anti-Mac arguments from people who are well-versed in the latest Wintel situation but haven't checked in on Apple in more years than you can count on a single hand.
www.macgamer.com
Thing One: This idea sounds like the iPod interface placed on a mouse. Cool idea, if true,
Thing Two: Apple has had a number of reasons for sticking with one-button mice, as mentioned elsewhere: They're easier for novices to use, they're easier and cheaper to make, and they offer third-party manufacturers a revenue opportunity. Don't forget the "bad old days" when Apple made nearly everything itself. It caught hell for that until it adopted USB and VGA in '97-98. An Apple two- or three-button mouse would piss off vendors it doesn't need to antagonize.
eh? If by "touchpads" you mean laptops with trackpads, you can attach a USB mouse to them with no problems - I have an Apple Pro mouse attached to my iBook.
When I'm on the move, I use the internal trackpad, and since it is close to the keyboard it is extremely easy to control+click to get right click funtion when necessary.
Most of the time I use command+shift+click with one hand to open links in tabs behind the current one. I very rarely use contol+click.
If you think it is going to speed you up, and help you to produce better music, just buy one! I though the same way, and just pluged in my old MS IntelliMouse, and it worked as a three button mouse with the wheels functioning properly within ALL applications, without installing a thing!
So, when you are out shopping next time, tost 20 bucks for a wheel mouse, and make you happy and productive. If you can spend thousands of dollars for Apple hardwares, I am sure spending $20-$50 will not bite much!
Just because Apple did not give you an N-button (N>1) mouse does not mean that Apple does not support it.
Our Dell Linux box came with a crapy Logitech mouse, which was causing unintensional mouse clicks when the wheel is turned. We did not complain why Dell did send us that mouse. We, in fact, did not ask for a mouse at all. So, I simply bought another optical MS mouse (the only good MS product!!!) for it, and we are all happy now, and more efficient on our experiments!
Do yourself a favor, and buy a new mouse.
You forgot to mention the guy who posts about his 9600/300 in every Mac story, taking two hours to copy a 17 meg file, thus making all Apples worthless.
And the obligatory "I'd buy a Mac but they're soooo expensive! I looked at the iBook, but then saw a Dell for $650, ok so it only has a CD rom drive, a cheap plastic case, no wireless, no firewire, but it's still better than the iBook because it has a faster processor!"
Like flight sim joysticks have, with the sole difference being that it's shaped differently.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
It's closer to a combination of the two. Pushing DOWN on the wheel in any of the 4 cardinal directions scrolls. Pushing straight down would be another function, and spinning the wheel clockwise or counter-clockwise woulld be two other functions (scrolling through links, fields, cursor movement, etc.). And with the proper tension adjustment, I can't see slippage being a problem. That same tension adjustment would prevent rotary movement when pushing down. It looks like a rather ingenious design to me.
It's also fair to point out that without a source on that observation, this is just your opinion. I know a ton of Mac people - practically all of my friends - and they love the optical mouse. There's more than a 'few high-up (?) die-hard UI (?!?) people' (that statement doesn't make any sense at all actually, it's not a UI issue, and who's high up? Some nameless Apple industrial designers?)
I've done extensive user testing for multi-button apps before. The earlier poster who mentioned the difficulties getting older computer-illiterate people to understand and adapt to these conventions is right - it is nearlyimpossible. It's very easy to forget, but when you've spent coutless hours in a UI lab watching Random Person stumble through what you consider to be the most trivial tasks... trust me. There's a very, very good reason for the 1 button mouse.
And not just one - an oft-overlooked fact is the right/left dominance thing. Lefties like to use their mice on the left side of the computer. It's important that your primary 'click' is your index finger. Swapping mouse sides can potentially swap your primary click - which you can re-map of course (computer expert that you are), but then your manuals are all wrong when they say left-click, right-click, etc.
Mac mice have never had an issue with left/right-handedness. (Also note that many creative types are right-brained, thus left-handed. This is important to some.)
The point is that you should *not* have to run out and drop *more* money to get another peripheral to make your spangling new Mac not suck. Apple had a (tenuous) reason to not include a second button...up until they introduced context menus triggered by *control-clicking*. At this point, they're just being stupid.
Oh spare me. The cost must be in the neighbourhood of $5, a vanishing percentage of the overall expense. The Apple keyboard is forced on you too, no one seems to complain about that. It makes more sense to me to include the simplest mouse by default from the original company, and people can drop the $30 for a multibutton mouse if they feel like it.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
"I can't afford to spend $1000 on a bottom of the range computer."
Is there a "bottom of the range porsche"?
Only when you compare to other Porsche cars.
Most of us care about value and what we will get out of our systems for the price we pay. Frankly Apple comes out in spades in that regard.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Why is everyone here so negative? Horray for Apple for getting some new stuff out there! Who cares if you guys don't like it? Why don't one (or all of you) go out and invent your own makes-everybody-happy ubermouse?
! !!!!
Why am I even bothering to log in anymore? All I do is read complaints from people who are never satisfied. Well, if you can't beat 'em, join em.
Check this out...Apple's idea sucks! Screw those punks and their sell-out style! Rotating disc? How 'bout rotating this! *grab grab*. 'Scuse me while I go use another companies' third-party POS mouse before I even see the finished Apple product! I'm gonna switch to Linux 'cause OS X is too pretty and I want a OS that is ugly and hard to use so I can look cool in front of all my friends... aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrghfggghggurgle...ppphhhlphhhpppt
Warm fuzzies, everbody! Not cold pricklies! Jesus.
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