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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?"
Cool. A mouse with a trackball on top of it.
I think someone should make a mouse with a keyboard on top of it. That way you can type without every taking your hand off the mouse.
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.
Ok, let's just read that article one more time: It describes a mouse with a DISC, not a TRACKBALL. Also, I can't see any hint of the disc serving as a second mouse button in the patent description. This being Apple, that disc thingy will probably be the only control-element on the mouse. One thing that the article itself seemed a bit confused about, was whether the disc was ROTARY (i.e. something you rotate, as on an old telephone) or just a kind of cross-button with 5 directions (horizontal, veritcal, and down).
here is a link.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
When the mouse was new people weren't used to using them, and Apple feared that more than one button would confuse people. It would be more familiar to do it like a keyboard where you have one key, but holding down a modifier key you can switch the functionality of they key. Apple went with this design simply for familiarity in concepts..
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
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.
More important to me than the four buttons is the rotary disc itself. The thumb wheel on the iPod makes for ridiculously easy scrolling through lists, long and small, with both fine control and super speed. That same ability on the desktop would be quite nice for:
- Navigating folders
- Any lists
- Video editing
- Brightness & Contrast settings
Pretty much any place a simple, unlimited movement with variable speed control is useful. In short, all over the place.I think a disc would be much more convenient than a scroll wheel. While the wheel consumes less surface space on the mouse, the limited range of motion of your finger makes scrolling long distances with it painful. However, I can trace circles on a surface with my finger with much less effort.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
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.
here
Looks like this will bring a tighter focus on mac gaming too, finally! All you PC-ers, prepare to get fragged!!
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Have you seen Trust's product lineup? A friend of mine bought this monstrosity from them the other day that had -- I kid you not -- the usual two buttons, two scrollwheels (one horizontal, one vertical; one was also a button), and another two buttons on the sides. That's a total of nine buttons, folks (counting the wheels as two buttons each). The Windows driver was about 60Mb.
It is a regular joke amongst our friends that it is only a matter of time before Trust made a mouse with a trackball on top of it, and that will be rapidly followed by a joystick mounted on top of a trackball atop a mouse. In the version 3, they'll add a four-way view switch button to the joystick and another half-dozen buttons to the bottom of the mouse. Version 4 will probably be wireless and integrate a toaster, oven and water cooler into the base of the charging cradle. You heard it here first.
You win again, gravity!
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
Hey, 1989 called... they want their browser back.
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.
You'd have to put two next to each other so you can coordinate the movements, but such a technique would allow you to scroll around a big screen quickly and accurately after a few minutes of practice.
/. nickname is quite fitting. :-)
You mean, like this?
Your
~Philly
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?
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
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.