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?"

Comments

An old idea in new clothes: radial controllers

[LinuxParanoid]

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.

You seem clueless :), what he meant was:

[DaedalusHKX]

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

Re:No...

[feldsteins]

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.)

The public is always five years behind

[coreytamas]

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.