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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?"
Sounds to me like it's just like a trackball, but for scrolling
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
It's a rotary dial, like on the iPOD, or those old telephones.
Yeah, I have no idea what they were smoking when they came up wit that one. Although 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.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I think the idea would be that if you're moving the mouse you might use it as a button, but you might use for fine control over things like paning.
Seems like car stereo's have had these sorts of controls for a while, and flight sticks, and fighter planes before that. I would hope the patent is more for their particular implimentation rather than, "Look! We took a button off device x, and hooked it into device y. No one else can combine chocolate and peanut butter without paying us first!"
But I can't be bothered to RTFA, its sunday for christ's sake.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Yes. Ergonomic studies show that a one-button mouse is easier to use than a two-button mouse.
It takes a small, but significant amount of time for the brain to process which finger to move to press a corresponding button.
Two+ button wielding mice jockeys, will, of course, spout on eternal about the increased efficiency of two+ button mice, and they will be correct for a limited set of scenarios (just like the CLI guys are right for specific cases). However, for general use, one-button mice are faster (do some stopwatch tests) and less error-prone than their two+ button counterparts.
Apple is all about ease of use, and that's why they continue to stick with one-button mice with their stock systems and will likely do so for the forseeable future.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Cripes.. the logitech cyberman had that but not as a stupid disc but as a nub or kind of tophat.
Let's patent technology that has been around nice to see apple is just as slimy as the rest of them.
Why does this just sound like a hat-switch that you find on joysticks? Of course it's a neat idea to plop it onto a mouse. Personally I'd rather have one under my thumb. I think a lot of people are used to using hat controllers that way. Hell, how many FPSes on the PS2 are best played by using the analog sticks with your thumb? Same thing here.
What is music when you despise all sound?
I work as a musician and producer and a one button mouse is a right pain when working on the Mac. Although I love OS X and Logic, I would be able to work much faster if Apple would provide some kind of scroll wheel so I could nip around documents much faster.
Although it is hard to know before seeing a real mouse I think the fact that this could be both Vertical and Horizontal will make it better to use than existing scroll wheels. I love the transparent Apple mouse so this would be an excellent improvement...
Now the next step is to get the music software to support it.... So hopefully Apple ownership will speed that up too...
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
Okay -- 2 things.
First, the joke -- the apple mouse wasn't designed for lemmings... it was designed for Lode Runner, airborne (with RealSound!) and Dark Castle.
Second, and trust me on this, when Apple came out with a Mac with a mouse, it wasn't for blind follwers... it was like WTF is this? Where is the command line? Apple even packaged an audio cassette w/ the first macs to tell you how to use the mouse -- because the concept was new for 'consumer' computers.
I would think that it would be fairly stright forward to write a jitter sensitivity control so that when the mouse was moving, presumably smoothly and relatively quickly, that the widget would have one context, and another when it was bouncing over a small range of points near each other. What would that annoying result be? I suspect an oh-no-second or so of lag between when you start to move the mouse, and when the cursor moves on the screen, with an additional slider in the driver window.
Even though, I'm a pc user and am not particularly fond of macs, apple shouldn't bite the bullet. Three things might happen: The market will embrace it and there will be a couple of clones, it'll be revolutionary and people will wonder how we ever made toast without it or why we ever drank beer out of bottles, or someone will collect unemployment. Either way, I don't see how any of those things are bad for me.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Didn't Toshiba do it first?
Now more and more laptops seem to have both a nipple and a trackpad, like Dell ones (presumably so that they can pick up more sales from both camps).
Personally I like my NEC, with a trackpad + a scroll slider between the L and R buttons. Indespensable once you get used to it. (Just like a wheel mouse, who wants to go back now?)
Beep beep.
Control system volume and navigation - launch apps - use for timeline and frame by frame manipulation in final cut pro - use for TRON tank turrets and Centipede!
A lot like this device: Shuttle Express You can see the similarities.
This is one reason the Mac is great - I have been able to use lots of devices that I have investments in; in lots of different ways. T68i & Romeo is just one example.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
At work I am having to use a free mouse that came with the computer system, despite my insistance that a decent mouse would add to productivity we have ended up with this completely and utterly useless peice of crap (which is why it's only a fiver I guess).
Ignoring the fact that as a normal mouse this is already pretty bad (sticky and clicky buttons and badly formed shape in the palm), that little blue thing on top? Pointless! I don't know what muppet designed this thing but it is utterly unusable, basically it is trying to be a trendy new type of scroll wheel or something. But, major point number one, it isn't a button and doesn't count as a third middle click. All it does is goes up and down, not like a wheel but just like a thing that you can push up or down or leave to spring back to the centre.
This might (might!) have been a decent design, although I'm still doubtful even then, but basically when you go to "scroll" down or up, no matter how careful you are just to tap it up or down, it almost always scrolls right to the very end of the document. They claim this is better than the mouse wheel somehow!
Anyway, slightly back on topic, if the Apple mouse is basically this but with horizontal scrolling too, then it's gonna be crappy. The Apple idea did conjur up in my mind the idea of a mouse with a track ball where the wheel is at the moment. Although perhaps complicating matters somewhat, it's also logical (in my mind, ha) so that there are two degrees of movement through the mouse (somewhat like moving your head whilst moving your eyes at the same time). This could (amongst other more pratical things) be pretty cool for doing the walking through Doom3 (for example) whilst at the very same time "looking" around freely using the track ball.
... I guess
The Apple / Bandai Pippin Controller had something similar to the trackball you are speaking of and it was/is the easiest to hold, most comfortable, game controller I have ever used. In fact, I use it with my Mac still -- with the ADB adapter and the USB adapter.
I would love for Apple to bring this down to wireless bluetooth mouse size. For now I like to use a Logitech Trackman Marble due to the fact I hate moving mice on the desk and the pippin controller.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I had to give him back his Apple Pro Mouse because he kept clicking the scroll wheel and saying because it was wireless he'd knock it off his desk.
Apple has LOTS of reasons for maintaining the one button. 1) Simplicity for the novice 2)Ease of manufacture/design 3)Left / Right compatibility (Steve is a lefty by the way)
I've used an IBM mouse with a trackpoint-like controller in the middle that can scroll horizontally and vertically. Isn't that prior art? Or does making the trackpoint round make it somehow innovative and unique? I don't think so, but I've heard of worse approved by the USPTO. r4lv3k
Ahhh. I was confused because I couldn't understand how the wheel could tell where it was being touched, but I think I see now. Can the solid state wheel on the iPod do this? I suppose it must be able to.
Possibly, but I don't think it has to. Like I say, I think it's a purely conceptual issue. Having to touch it in the right place would be even more confusing and wouldn't allow you to rotate continously without lifiting your finger.
Given that a scroll bar only works on one axis, the only difference is how you map that axis to your finger motions. The current scrollwheels are counter-intuitive, since it's not immediately obvious that you can use it to scroll horizontally, and it's not obvious which direction the wheel should be turned.
A flat wheel doesn't suffer this problem. You use it just the same, but it doesn't feel counter-intuitive to the user to turn a wheel clockwise to move right the way it feels odd to turn a wheel up to go left.
Has no one mentioned that this patent goes almost hand in hand with the current Mac rumors regarding implementing "piles" of documents to replace, somewhat, file folders on the desktop. Think how easy it would be to shuffle through a "pile" of documents with this new mouse! Anyway, that's just rumor talk.
Basicly a jog-wheel that functions as a d-pad; which means 2 analog directions and 4 digital.
The real problem here is implementing this or any other multidirectional system on a mouse so it's not cumbersome, especially if Apple plans to keep the "no-button" design.
Too many zeros, not enough ones