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Multi-Button OpenOfficeMouse At OOoCon 2009
An anonymous reader writes "WarMouse has announced their new multi-button OpenOfficeMouse for OpenOffice.org at the 2009 OOoCon in Orvieto, Italy. The mouse, which features 18 buttons, a scroll wheel, and an analog joystick, has double-click functionality on every button and stores up to 63 application and game profiles in its 512k of flash memory. The OpenOfficeMouse runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X; its customization software will be released as free and open source software." We couldn't decide if this was a protest against Apple's new magic mouse, an elaborate practical joke, or just plain insanity run amok. In any case, it is hard to imagine a world in which so many tiny buttons on a mouse make sense.
Clearly you don't PvP...
This is like the 300th time I've posted this.. STOP MAKING UP NEW INTERFACES. Mouse and keyboard? 30 some odd years now.. mouse and keyboard. Its not that confusing.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
This mouse is a good metaphor for Linux and OSS. Too many choices and very confusing interfaces. Good job guys!
Why bother
the OpenOffice "effort" split into the (clumsy) user interface and (not that good) underlying render library? And make the whole thing available in a more free license?
Instead of coming up with such an ergonomical disaster?
While I resent using Microsoft Office because of its sheer cost (its business model being but a nail in the coffin), I have to admit that the look and feel of the Great Evil(tm) outweighs that of OpenOffice by (hundreds of) miles. Such a pointless effort from the OO staff just makes me wonder whether Sun (or is that Oracle?) just want to ditch OpenOffice altogether. Well, fine, but they could just ditch it by dropping support for it and changing its license so that a real, motivated community take it over and make something really useful out of it.
It's too bad that hardware built today has little to no ability to just add or remove components as needed instead of designing a sepate piece of hardware for every possible combination. Imagine instead of buying a mouse with 18 buttons and tons of things you may or may not need; you could get a bare bones mouse that you could just clip on new components as you needed. As an analogy, it'd be like snapping lego blocks together to make different things yourself is better than having to buy a specific configuration of blocks that can not be modified. Want a 10 button mouse? get the components together and snap the pieces into place. Hate that trackball after all? swap it out for a laser tracking component instead. The possibilities are nearly endless. Of course, there's already something liek this just not for mice and such yet... Open hardware.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
They're not useless - those stupid gadgety mice with a bazillion button ensures that the poor little 2 button and a wheel optical mice never cost more than $15. If simple mice were the norm I might be paying $75 for a decent one :).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Also, if anyone wants to see what this monstrosity looks like now that the site is slashdotted, I got this in the coral cache: http://www.openofficemouse.com.nyud.net/branding/images/OOM-OSS.jpg
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
I have a mouse (Logitech MX Revolution) with the functional equivalent of 10 buttons.
You know, I though it was a pretty cool idea when I bought it, but I now must admit that I really only use 2 buttons.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
True, but they're also hard to find if you want "just a basic" anything but USB mouse. For instance, it's very difficult to find an encrypted, bluetooth, full-sized, optical, wheel mouse without side-buttons.
Whoever thought side buttons are a good idea for a non-gaming mouse should be drug out into the street and pelted with rotten produce. Freakin' have to hold the mouse ever so gingerly if you don't want to accidentally flip web pages* or, if you're on a mac, something even more annoying.
*It's freakin' 2009. netbooks have 2GB of ram. Why the 'F does the page have to reload when I hit the back button, or two pages reload if I did so accidentally and hit the forward button immediately thereafter. Why aren't the fully rendered pages cached for several levels of back-ed-ness? (determined by some algorithm relating to the available RAM, to balance off use against the filesystem cache) If I need to reload, F5 is right there on the keyboard. My main use of tabs at the moment is because "back" is not implemented properly on any of the browsers I use.
It seems I have a lot of anger.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Anybody else configuring the HealBot addon for WoW in the back of their mind?
If you need that much security, you're probably better off going with a wired mouse anyway. Besides, you also get better accuracy and less/no lag.
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine -- Robert C. Gallagher
"Why aren't the fully rendered pages cached for several levels of back-ed-ness"
Because then people will claim your browser has a memory leak.
not to mention semantics of HTTP