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Mouse Fun from Microsoft
James Cook writes "A mouse that can sense when your hand touches it was built a while ago by the boys at Microsoft Research. It enables nifty user interface tricks, like toolbar menus that fade away when you aren't touching the mouse. I want one, then I want Linux drivers for it." Forget who built it. This looks like something worth having (once enough Linux software supports it to make it worthwhile.)
This isn't a problem inherent to intellimice. Any mouse is capable of jumping to the default button.
And quite honestly, I like not having to move my mouse. The less my hands leave the keyboard, the more work I can get done (like posting to Slashdot).
I don't know this for absolutly, but I'm pretty sure about what would happen. You would have the toolbar, take your hand off the mouse, and then the text would rise up to meet the now minimized toolbar. When you put your hand back on the mouse, the text would shrink down so that the toolbar doesn't cover anything. Or, if you use Internet Explorer or have access to it, there should be an option somewhere to make it "Full Screen" and it does basically the same thing I was talking about.
I think the wheel is worth the money. It's not too helpful in Linux, except it performs as the third button, but it's really nice in Windows. It's my one click to bring up Windows Explorer, and I can use it to scroll through web pages. It's faster than having to move the mouse pointer to the side scroll thing.
If you're too ignorant to make the changes, I have little simpathy.
And you wonder why most people don't use Open Source. Seesh.
My ex GF had one of those. Whenever i whould touch it she could tell!)
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
I can see in the near future:
:-)
FIRST EVER WEB SERVER RUN ON A MOUSE!!!
Easy enough. Take one of those webserver-in-a-matchbox things and put it inside a serial mouse.
This is probably the greatest idea ever in the field of computational interface technology (CIT)! Thank the Lord that the government haven't been able to hinder MS in their God given right to innovate. How on earth have we been able to get along without a mouse that is touch sensitive? Well, I for one don't know!!! What is next? A keyboard that activates once you touches it? Who else but MS can come up with these mind boggling inventions? Certainly not me, that's for sure!!!
W S B
WSB
combine this with a date function and you have "where do you want to go today?" :)
But seriously, the current intelli mouse driver already can make some assumptions about where you are going. I find it annoying and have it turned of most of the time but its there. It guesses to which GUI component you are moving your mouse and goes there automatically.
Jilles
Before you start bashing MS about this, don't you think you should consider that a good 50% of Linux was designed in this manner?
Of course, but with linux, bad ideas tend to die from lack of support. There are surely 10 times as many linux "features" that never became mainstream because they were lousy and didn't catch on. It doesn't work this way with MS, they make their stuff and push it onto customers. The only alternative is a "no to all".
Well they're examples of uses. It's up to application vendors to program what they do, and most likely they'll be user selectable.
think for once.
just as a friend describing the menu's on W2K (they fade in and out), more "eye candy"....
Well, since you were wondering, I read it and here's a reply:
I think the mouse post is actually pretty interesting although it might be more relevant if it wasn't just research and was actually going to be produced sometime soon....I'd definitly be interested.
Definately agree that it was an interesting post, however I don't think something needs to be near production to be relevant. I mean for one thing its always nice to see whats out on the horizen. For another, I think the question sparked some useful debate and user interface issues, or at least it got me thinking about it.
A few weeks ago there was an article about these one man, wearable jet packs (or something like that). I mean obviously those things are no where near production, but it was still kinda cool to read about them.
I'd also have to agree that it's gotten to the point where there's to many stories....I used to actually go to Slashdot and at least read through each abstract but as of last I just go to my "daily page" that gets updated with the headlines once an hour and only come to /. if one of those looks interesting.
I disagree, I think its a good thing to have a decently large number of stories published here. Even if you aren't interested in every single one of them, there's nothing wrong with skipping over ones that don't interest you, maybe you could even . (Well, I'll give a little bit on the Guide to Geek Love or whatever the hell that was... that did seem like a bit much).
In part I'm posting for a totally different reason......I've been wondering how thoroughly these threads are read once the they're more than a few hours old and there's more than 75 posts. I'm guessing a HUGE majority of reader just leave their threshold at 3 or 4 and just read the few posts that make it that high.
I would think that these things are pretty carefully read up to the first page or so of replies... I mean once it reaches 500 or so comments, then people probably just ignore the later ones.
And on a final, slightly off topic note (but related to your comment), I keep my threshold at -1. Frankly I'd rather make my own decisions as to what are good remarks and what aren't.
-- Point? None! Cob.
The mouse that comes with the Wacom Intuos Tablets
has this. Additionally it is wireless, needs no
batteries, no ball and uses absolute positioning.
Unfortunately the thumb wheel isnt supported at
all under Linux. When I find the time Ill try to
hack that into The Gimp at least.
ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-x, ctrl-z (copy, paste, cut, undo) you mean :)
The point is that most of the toolbar buttons are really useless clutter and cause confusion for the user. There is already a method to present the user with many organized options, it's called the 'pulldown menu'.
I unfortunately must use M$ products at work, and I can tell you that I normally only use one or two of the stupid toolbar buttons at any time.
I could go on, but I think ya'll get my point.
No one got beat up more often than the mimes of the old west!
microsoft mice, keyboard, joysticks, etc etc, just don't compare to microsoft. Microsoft Scroll wheel is a joke:
Remember the Microsoft mouse with the wheel - Intelli-Mouse? What a con! It would only work with applications that had been made to support the mouse wheel, such as Microsoft Office etc. You had to wait until Windows 98 to use it with other applications, unless you found a third party application.
Logitech got it right from the start with their scroll wheel mice. Their mice could work with all (32 bit) applications, whether or not the applications supported it. With all the other features that MouseMan range has, they are far more suprior than the Microsoft Mouse.
5 Mouse Button logitech mice is what logitech give us, so flexible and well, easier to use. When logitech bring out a version of this microsoft mice, it will offer soo much more than MS version... just wait.
As for the MS natural keyboard, there are far cheaper keyboards than are just the same.
Again, most people only use mice etc is because its microsoft and NOT because its the best... hmm, same as software.
as a user of ms-windows at work, this sounds like a great idea....
on an unrelated note--what if we had a be-os cluster of these mice?
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
The touchpad recognizes not only that I'm touching it, but where I'm touching it. All kinds of software can be written to take advantage of the touchpad's events.
Every other new notebook has one of these.
Now how much research did it take to slip that "new technology" into a desktop rodent?
The types of things that software can do is unlimited. As it is now, that software detects the touchpad events.
It looks like all M$ did was add event handlers into their own software.
Typical M$. Steal and profit.
--
I wrote the play & still own the script
what we need is a good 3d input device. THAT would be different.
I'm trying to think of a viable use for touch-mice (beyond eliminating M$ toolbars, which I'd much rather eliminate perminantly). Perhaps removing the cursor from the screen would be a useful function for a mouse like this. Basically it tells the computer that you're not using the mouse and can keep it out of the way, but fading toolbars would get annoying very quickly while a disappearing cursor isn't quite so bad.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Just what we always needed. Next thing you know we will have a mouse that detects where you _want_ to go. And if you actually move the mouse in a direction other then this predicted direction, a paperclip will come up and inform you that the mouse has travelled in the wrong direction.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
Usually, the cord is strong enaugh to push the mouse around, even when you're not touching it. Implementing fading toolbars on move/no-move would give a very jumpy screen.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
I have to say they're mice rule. I love their intellimouse, it gently fits the curvature of my hand. And that other mouse that takes a bunch of pictures is fairly cool too.
This mouse will definatly revolutionize the porn industry. And the hell with those "Microsoft Suxs" people, they make good hardware.
I work in an academic lab and we have a number of 3d pointing devices. The Logitech magellan that can simultaniously move through 6-degrees of freedom (translations rotations). As well as a spaceball thingy that also can rotate in 3d. They are out there, there just aren't many drivers for them. They also aren't quite as elegant as a mouse either, IMO. Mice are very "natural" feeling...
-- Moondog
I hate M$ as much as the next nerd, but I gotta say, this is pretty nifty. What with this and the IntelliMouse Exploder or whatever the gloy mouse is called, Billy's been making some cool toys in the rodent department. It might get kind of annoying to have stuff constantly blinking all the time, but if the interface was done right (yeah, right), it might be an improvement. Or maybe I'm dumb and it's just a pathetic marketing ploy.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
isn't the slashdot software open source as well? I can go grab the code by just clicking on the "code" link in the left column....
--
You mean; Microsoft corporatly takes over good hardware. That's where they got the intellimouse from! It was a small company that had a good idea, only their mice never seemed to work on 3.1 and they couldn't figure it out. When win95 came out, there was nothing they could do to get their mice to work. They went bankrupt and had to sell the whole works off... Who do you think bought the whole shooting match for 1 cent on the dollar? Don't kid yourself; people don't scream at them for stifling inovation for no reason, it was Microsoft! Intellimouse should have tried to go after the Mac market; Apple never compeates (intentionally) with it's developers and never blocks the inventions of others from working on their machines. The only problem with that idea, though, is that Mac users like myself tend to only buy one item at a time and we expect it to work for the life time of our machines (about 25 years...). Accessory developers dont make much money on a market like that.
Qybix ----- I do not have a belief system; I'm an Anti-theist and proud of it! Saying that not believing in anything i
A legitimate innovation by Microsoft!? Will wonders never cease?
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Supposedly. But lets see, how long has it been since a recent code change has been posted? (it's been a while since I've checked, but last time I checked it was quite a while)
And then there's the use restrictions, you *must* link to slashdot from your site if you use slash...
I hope to die peacefully in my sleep like grandpa, not screaming like his passengers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hey! Douglas Adams stole my idea!!!
A few years back I made a little software program for my friends, said it was a preview of windows 2001. It was just a fullscreen visualbasic app that had a big button in the middle that said 'OK' - you click on it and it ran a random program.
I hope to die peacefully in my sleep like grandpa, not screaming like his passengers.
A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless (but his handle is Master Predator) loves his IBM keyboard: With his favorite keyboard he can burn rubber at 160WPM!
They may be old, they may be heavy, but they worked like a charm!
Qybix ----- I do not have a belief system; I'm an Anti-theist and proud of it! Saying that not believing in anything i
"It enables nifty user interface tricks, like toolbar menus that fade away when you aren't touching the mouse."
More eyecandy and stupid gui tricks from MS...how is this useful in the slightest? This is on par with the amazing zooming menus. A lot of use it is...anyway, if I'm not touching the mouse, I'm possibly gone from the computer, at which point it doesn't matter what tricks it does, I won't see it...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
The other disturbing trend is, toolbar elements you cannot remove, like on web browsers. . .
I want and NEED a back, forward, reload, and stop buttons, maybe not forward. But definately, I DO not need, Home, Search, Netscape, Print, or Security, or especially SHOP. (end netscape criticism, start IE criticism:) I don't need a Favorites, History or Channels button wasting space on the toolbar (I think Favorites ought to be a menu, like in Netscape, right?) (okay, Netscape Windows, it's a toolbar button, netscape Mac, it's a menu item - so much for consistency across platforms) I wish I could also get rid of the Mail and Edit buttons on IE, because maybe I have a different Mail program, and don't want to use OE, and maybe I have a different HTML editor, and don't want to use frontpage, but the thing that REALLY irks me, is that Favorites is both a toolbar button AND a menu item. And the fullscreen button, take that off and shove it up your ass, wtf?! Isn't there a fullscreen button on every freaking window in the UI? Why do we need another fullscreen button? WASTE OF SPACE!!
Not to mention that even the middle button in the upper-right widget set is redundant, because you can also fullscreen the window by double-clicking the toolbar, or pulling down the menu from the upper-left widget.
I guess I just really hate how lame the Windows95 UI is.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Tech Review did an article on Lord Bill's Boys-in-the-Back-Room back in January. (Same issue they covered linux.) (Alas, no link to the M$ article.)
Basically the article pointed out that The-Boys-From-Redmond are the only software house with a research arm (remember Xerox is fundamentally a hardware company.), M$ has beaucoup bucks, and a lot of big name people, but still has yet to create any sort of breakthrough. (compare to XeroxPARC that created the GUI in only a few years)
The article suggests that the reason is that M$ is too secure in its position, and thus won't take the risks needed to motivate an R&D lab. Also the lab is too product driven and thus doesn't have the freedom just to go off and play.
However, M$ Research has contributed to pretty much every recent major M$ product. Such contributions include data compression, and speech recognition. Oh yeah, you know that inference engine help uses in Office? M$ Research did that.
Quote For You!
M$ Research Director Dan Ling on where M$ needs to do more research (pg49):
"The amount of time and effort that goes into testing software and getting the bugs out is enormous. And yet there are still bugs, and people still complain and say nasty things. We're trying to think about breakthroughs that we can make to dramtically improve the quality of software."
(2 weeks later M$ "innovates" lint.)
Oh, the right button in Windows? That's for waiting 15+ seconds for the CM to popup.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Same reason as for the wheelmouse: the touch/no-touch events should map to X-events, probably specific to XFree. The applications (eg. the toolkits) should understand these events and implement them. Since there are many toolkits and even more applications, support will be very limited.
Too bad, I kinda like the idea.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
I agree -- I like things like this, but only when they work well, and "working well" is rare. Not the designers' fault exactly, more that people use technology of all sorts in individual ways.
The problem is that there are a lot of things to go wrong, because the logic that controls sensitive technology has to second-guess the user constantly. What does it mean that the mouse hasn't been touched for a while? Does it mean the user isn't interested in seeing menus? (Y / N)
The idea of a monitor that turns off when you're not in front of it, for instance, is an interesting one -- but what if you're playing a DVD on your monitor screen and sitting on your couch a bit further away?
Same with the phone that directs calls while you're sleeping to a (presumably silent) asnwering machine. It would be great
The catch with all of this "sensitive technology" is the difficulty of predicting inherently ambiguous possibilities, and providing easy escape mechanisms so users can enjoy the "dumb" way of doing thngs when that's what actually makes sense.
Sites like the User Interface Hall of Shame have done a good job gathering examples, but we all know of good ones -- UI designs (not just in computers, in all contexts) where the intended message is not well-expressed by the interface.
I recommend the book by Donald A. Norman called THe Design of Everyday Things to anyone designing anything (software, house, manual) which will be used by other people unfamiliar with its design. In fact, I think everyone should read this book! Everyone! Everyone!
Just a thought,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Will the mouse call the SPCA when I abuse it during Quake III matches?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I was just checking out the research link and am amazed at the amount of research MS has...
/that/ off??
Some even in Beijing, China...how do they pull
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Optical mice or woefully overrated; their primary deficiency is the lack of precision in the feel of their movement. My theory is that since an optical mouse has to transition from static friction to kinetic friction it results in a herky-jerky yet vague feel, and it's particularly noticeable because few mouse movements are sustained in one direction. Non-optical mice have balls which roll, employing static friction the entire time if they don't slip.
This has contributed to the continuing lack of popularity, and hence dearth of ancillary features, like ergonomics, wheels and greater than 3 buttons. I think optical mice are only good for CAD type applications, where pixel-based precision is required.
BTW, I hate MS software, but I love MS hardware -- I have a Natural Elite keyboard, and love every keystroke. The Win95 keys are good for alternate mappings.
*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring bohemian. ***
I quite agree. Miscrosoft's real strength is in mice and joysticks.
Adam:What kept you?
God:Rome wasn't built in a day
You should work where I work. I can't believe how little room the people here leave for actual editing space. Some people have about four or five rows of toolbars in addition to all the other stuff. Less than half the screen is the actual document. I have no idea how they work like that... A magical touch mouse solution is probably just what they'd want.
. . . along with their powered chair with back massager, glow-in-the-dark pencil holder, and dangly monitor ornaments (post-it notes).
Personally, I only have one thing on my monitor - a Dilbert clipping.
-d9
.. the other research projects?
if you look at the Functional Reactive
' god damn this is one wacky game show ' ~ jay in mallrats
I know, because the one I am currently typing on was salvaged from an old parts sale at a local college, where it was pounded on for 8 years by ham-fisted CS majors. All other keyboards are to this keyboard what a sheet of toilet paper is to kevlar.
(And I have 4 of em! yippee!)
so naturally, because they are the best keyboards ever, you can't buy them anymore.
Such is progress.
Lotek---
Ok. So it's nice that M$ is starting to 'invent' (well... Ok. Steal old tech that didn't make it at the time). But how about if they try and sell it to do something useful then?
;)
I mean. I navigate with my mouse (err... Trackball). If I wanted the toolbars to go away it would be when I'm not near them or something. It would do no good if they where gone when I wasn't touching the mouse. I am in more need of it when I want to scroll around some document and see if I got it all right. Now if they REALLY want to sell mice that feels when they are touched. They shuld do something like figureing out who is using the mouse and make the system switch to act they way (s)he want's it to act or something else useful (I'm hard pressed to find a good application for touch/release events tho). All this just seems like something M$ would like to sell us and finds a couple of arguments that sounds good if you don't think about them.
Oh well... I'll never give up my trusty trackball... Well... Maybe when they offer me full sensory input and a 3D interface that's usable
I think this is a marvelous idea... Toolbars generally aren't keyboard-accessible anyway, so why should they be visible if I don't have my hand on the mouse?
MSK
If I have cybersex, will I loose my virginity?
;)
Uh, like using a mouse and a pointing device?
I don't think I should've taken those beers...
.. the other research projects? if you look at the Functional Reactive Animation pages.. under the notes you will find ..
.. the page does say that it was just update 4 days ago....
"Fran works with Windows only. You'll need DirectX version 3 or better. I recommend that you get the latest version if you have Windows 95 or 98, or NT 5.0. DirectX 3 works with NT 4.0 if you have Service pack 3 installed (available via the DirectX 5 page). My plan for Unix, etc., is to wait until DirectX is running there (in the works, but I don't know any of the details)."
' god damn this is one wacky game show ' ~ jay in mallrats
After poking around Microsoft's research site for a while, I realized that there were actually some cool and/or interesting projects listed. For example, some guy is writing an implementation of IPv6 for NT... it's even downloadable so users can test it out. Someone else has designed a PDA pen that recognizes handwriting with accelerometers and stores the text. Very cool... they've even built a prototype.
I guess the point is this:
Even if a lot of people don't agree with Microsoft's "business practices" and don't like its software, there are people within the company who do some cool things. Many of those people could have ended up in any number of other places, but they happen to work for a company a lot of people dislike. I think each product from Microsoft should be evaluated on its own merits. Despite the crappiness of some of their past products, some of the stuff they're researching looks insteresting at the very least.
At Georgia Tech I'm working on a project that will allow you to control the mouse by thinking. It's for people who are completely paralyzed. The downside is that you have to have electrodes implanted in your brain for it to work. Check out http://www.neuralsignals.com
I've always been one of those slashdotters that watched mostly and posted only on an extreme fiew occasions. Perhaps the reason the number of stories/posts seems so overwhelming (and it does to me too) is because slashdot in it's current format no longer is conducive to the ideas it was created with. As much as I hate overcomplication, maybe stories, posts, and the like need a new way of being sorted and presented. It's just my two cents, but nothing can stay the same forever and hope to survive. If there was a way for slashdotters to more easily get to the topics they are interested in, they might more easily learn about those topics. Simply having a list of topics and a pile of posts about those topics might not be the answer anymore. Now there is the ability to filter out certain topics and subjects, scores, and on and on.. but maybe there is a simpler way. I am not trying to take anything away from all those who make this sight possible, as I love to read it most everyday.. but I think we should have a discussion as a community as to where we want our (their?) site to go in the future. Thanks for listening....
-- let me burn you let me burn you let me burn you -Front 242
Ok I have this awesome trackball from logitech, 80 bucks. It's been around for a while, I doubt there will be any applications that use the 4th button to emulate the scroll wheel like it should. Atleast any time soon. In rxvt there are some options about 4 and 5 button trackballs and I've tried it and it doesn't work. This is why I don't think something like this would come into universal use any time soon. Perhaps if they were hyped more and were affordable, durable, etc, then maybe this would become a reality. But hell, it's just a friggin gui trick, I'm not losing any sleep over it
rm -rf ~/.signature
I'd never heard of this thing, but a quick google search (I love that search engine) came up with this for all those interested...
http://www.nashville.net/~theremin/
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I saw the band "Man, or Astroman?" play a Therman once. It was cool. They also played a computer keyboard and some other weird stuff.
-Greg
--
Nobody ever said it was impossible for somebody at Microsoft to come up with something good. It would be absurd to think that mere complete moral decay and evilness precluded the possibility of bright ideas ;)
What's wrong with this picture? Only that MS will certainly patent the idea and then do everything possible to crush anyone else working in the same area. There are no individuals doing cool things at Microsoft for the very simple reason that to Microsoft they are not individuals but part of The Great Microsoft Irresistible Force, which is dedicated to 100% world domination, as seen in lots of thoughtful quotes on record such as 'We only want a reasonable marketshare. What is reasonable? We think 100% is reasonable.'
You simply cannot restrict a pragmatic view to only what these people produce. The true pragmatist has got to look at what they _do_ as well, and ask whether it's worth it to cherry-pick what bright ideas MS does have, at the expense of continually helping them crush everyone else's bright ideas. At what point does this become not worth it? For me that happened some time ago, so I have to be unmoved by reports of MS bright ideas. I _know_ they can have good ideas. They own _people_, literally own the minds of thousands upon thousands of people, some of which did great work on their own before they were assimilated. MS may have only wanted to get such people out of circulation, but why should I or anybody be surprised if such people continue thinking of great things even in captivity? Well-paid captivity, I'll grant. Why not think of who benefits from such ideas? If you only consider utility and convenience and don't consider power, you set yourself up to be exploited, and to whinge later on how you _wanted_ to be exploited because you walked into the situation of your own free will. This is merely rationalization for your lack of foresight- nobody wants to be exploited.
Ummm... dude? Did you actually look at the screenshots in the article?
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Yup.. I got the FroceFeedback joystick.. its the best one I used. I don't know about their mouse thought. I like their Keyboards The older one.. not the USB version of Natural Keyboard.
If everybody didn't keep trying to copy bloody Windows we wouldn't be wasting so much screen real estate anyway!
Each window has:
1 menubar
1 button bar
1 status bar
The other thing is, you can do those kind of tricks by checking for mouse movement! You don't need sensors in the mouse to detect a hand.
Deleted
Actually, what would be MOST useful, would be a fully-featured digital telephone PCI card. We have TV-tuners that can plug in into a PCI slot, why not a telephone? I already have my computer hooked up to a telephone line, I have a computer on my desk, with speakers and a microphone, and a keypad for entering numbers, then I have a telephone on my desk. Wouldn't it be nice to get rid of the telephone, and use the nice peice of telecommunications equipment that's there? Think of people who work in jobs like order entry and tech support - the phone can do a caller ID and enter that into the database automatically, saving the user the step of entering it, damn, sounds like a no-brainer to me. What's with this stupid touch-mouse crap? Do something that removes clutter and makes my life easier.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
As far as your first behavior, the mouse pointer, MacOS TextEdit APIs do this by default and always have. That's basically every text entry place in every Mac program for every Mac ever made, because custom controls ended up having to duplicate the behavior or look stupid. We LOVE this behavior too, and I can't wait to see it show up in Linux, typing under a pointer is tiresome and obscures what you're typing. :)
The second behavior is no kind of default mac behavior, but there's been a extensions hack for years that does exactly this. It's pretty cool, though doing hacks like that on MacOS isn't a safe thing and can make lotsa crashes if you run the wrong program. I believe it does it by changing the MenuBarHeight value- it's officially a varying value anyhow, because internationalisation requires that some languages get more space to show ideograms or things up there
because MR Research is designed to be little more than a PR stunt, and a tax dodge. They could cure cancer, and probably have, and we'd never know it. At least they can prevent this talent from falling into the hands of those naughty competitors.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
A huge number of posts here say that
1) Disappearing UI stuff is a cool idea
2) It's debatable whether a touch sensor is really needed to make the UI enhancements mentioned.
Am I the only one that doesn't get it? Why would you want your toolbars, menus, icons etc. to disappear? It sounds very annoying, as well as confusing for newbies.
If you think automatically disappearing UI elements is a neat idea, and you use Win9x/WinNT regularly, try setting your taskbar to "AutoHide", and see if you still like the idea. I tried it for a while. I thought it would be great to get a little extra on-screen real estate. I've since changed my mind. It was always popping up when I didn't want it. It was slow, because I had to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen to pop the taskbar up, then I had to read the taskbar, then choose which item I wanted. When it's visible all the time, I can just move to the button I want directly, and it's much faster.
That's the whole point of a toolbar, it's supposed to be a FAST shortcut to a menu item. If it's invisible, selecting an item will take longer, and the purpose is defeated.
I'd turn off those pop-up tooltips things, too, if I knew how. They're always popping up and obscuring the control I'm really after.
Years ago, I worked as a Macintosh computer lab assistant. There were plenty of users who couldn't handle a mouse with ONE button, and NO strange self-disappearing UI features. I've seen plenty of intelligent folks (like me, sometimes) who still don't know when to double click and when to single click. I know otherwise graceful and coordinated people who have to try several times to complete a single double click successfully. My point is that if we need to change things about the accepted norms for GUIs at this point, I think we need to make them simpler and more consistent, not more complicated and more confusing.
To anyone who is interested in such matters, I'd reccomend the recently-slashdot-mentioned User Interface Hall Of Shame. Among the "Rules Of Thumb" for good UI design is "Make new-user features visible and accessible." Making things disappear clearly violates that one.
Reading sensor: We already use the wheel touch sensor in the On-Demand interface to sense when the user begins a scrolling interaction. Since IntelliMouse users often leave their finger perched on the wheel while reading, an intriguing possibility is that dwell time on the wheel may prove useful as a predictor of how much time the user has spent reading content on a web page, for example. We have not yet tested the wheel sensor in this role.
Great, another way to suruptiously extract information from web users.I like the way they hid this aspect deep within the document.
NT is based on the premise that anyone who can manipulate a mouse can administer a system. Huh?!?
And you can get an OEM MS Intellimouse for $14 at a computer fair, if you're lucky enough to have them nearby (or online, if you hunt around a bit -- try pricewatch).
Currently, having a minimal toolbars and such is very nice, but you have to think about why that's the case. The reason I don't like having the screen full of toolbars is because they're taking space when I'm not using them. If they only came into existence when I'm actually using the mouse, and silently faded (or preferably slid) away when I wasn't using the mouse, it wouldn't really matter how much space it took during the few times I actually want to use the mouse.
Visit me on #weirdness on the Galaxynet.
It's that simple. They don't need to take the effort to make good ideas into products as long as they can prevent anyone else from having them. You can depend that they are trying to patent everything they can, and that the patents are certainly not going to the person who had the idea, but to the Company.
If you don't like this, don't buy MS stuff, because it's all quite legal and business as usual. The only difference is that MS has more power than most entire countries, more money, and can buy out just about anybody- hence the numbers of brilliant people working at MS without any visible consequences to the MS customer- because you the customer are dirt, and for _your_ applications they make teams of recent college graduates and have them working 90 hours a week or more and sleeping under their desks like trapped animals. _You_ don't get the brilliant ones, oh no! Those are reserved for making patent applications so no competing Brilliant One can offer you anything better than the rubbish you're fed by MS Consumer Level.
If you don't like this, don't buy MS stuff, because it's all quite legal and business as usual... and frankly the way these things are set up, that's the only way to go if you're an MS. It maximizes return on human investment and blocks other people's innovation as effectively as possible. If they had to actually bother to benefit the consumer with the good ideas, the Brilliant Ones would be slowed down and not make as many patent proposals. Naturally a bit trickles down anyhow, but there is no reason that has to continue, and ideally for MS, it would stop so ALL the Brilliant Ones' efforts could be solely towards intellectual property with no requirement to do anything with it at all. Now _that_ would be _efficient_. You could own everything in the field of computing in five years if you didn't actually have to produce any of it as products!
If you don't like this, don't buy MS stuff.
This is somewhat offtopic to the ORIGINAL post, but...Unless you've got a really old or some type of exotic monitor, you can just go ahead and get rid of the screensaver, if you hate it that much. The likelyhood of image burn-in with any monitor built in the last 5+ years is pretty slim. Screensavers are by and large cosmetic add-ons these days.
The Intellimouse Explorer is powered by HP technology. HP Labs profile of the creator of the new optical mouse
I used one that was hooked up to a skiing
game. While it sort of worked, it took a while
before you could actually control it. And not
much longer to figure out what was actually
happening.
You stick your finger in a hole and press down
on a few contacts, and then you're supposed to
"think" the skiier to the left or the right to
control him(her). But what I noticed was that
in order to get the skiier to move, I would
really have to concentrate -- to the point where
I was using "body english" and leaning my whole
body a bit to the left or right. Then I noticed what
effect it was having on my finger, and it was
a no-brainer to realize that tilting your finger
a little to the left or the right was all it took
to make the device "work", and that's in fact
what was happening when you were "concentrating"
on getting the skiier to move.
So I'd have to say that, yes, it's a hoax.
I have to say one thing:
I love Microsoft's mouses.
Argue with me all you want, but even if it did come from the Devil, the Devil did this exceptionally well. My mouse is still smooth as the first day I got it, and that was three years ago.
-- K
Yes. Has been for quite a while, actually. Try http://www.inria.fr/koala/colas /mouse-wheel-scroll/ for information on making it all work. StarOffice supports it out-of-the-box, Gnome mostly does, KDE is working on it, and a bunch of other applications are or already have added support for it.
I was comparing this new device's main feature to another feature we've already got; the screen saver. I was attempting to make a base for my case; I'd hardly consider that off-topic to the ORIGINAL post. (Your emphasis, not mine.)
James
The mouse would need a capacitance sensor, though, so that it wouldn't drift if your table is at a slight angle. It should probably sense change-in-acceleration, rather than absolute acceleration, for the same reason.
This would be an amazingly precise mouse, that would never jam or get dirty, would respond to your slightest touch, be reasonably cheap to produce, and would just be cool as hell.
I know, though, that Microsoft will patent touch mice, now. I suppose I could still build one for my own use -- which is all I really wanted to do, anyway.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
That's also why this second button was not actually used for several years by Windows (in 3.1, it was useless, contextual menu was only added in '95). Indeed, the reason for its presence was legal, not technical.
Part of the reason why MS finally added a function to that button may actually have been the Unix precedent, which does use all available buttons.
Say no to software patents.
However, there is no need to build a new device for this feature: the existing mice give all needed information. What's the difference between:
- a mouse which doesn't move,
- a mouse which doesn't move AND the user has not the hand on the mouse?
In both cases, there is no need to display the icon bars or any other mouse-related widget. They will never be clicked if the mouse is still.--
"Show me the code" - Linus.
I can't wait to 3D model with a force feedback mouse. Need to stretch that vertex ever so slightly? Just increase the tension and slowly push it in. It's like working with virtual clay. And talk about cool image maps, when feel a ripply water effect under your hand or maybe a rough stone gateway. Not to mention the possible application for the visually impared, feeling the pointer drop into the the scroll bar around a window. You can have your touchy mouse, I want a feely one. P.S. I know somewhere in Palo-Alto California there is a company making this, I just wish I remebered whom. Read that article years ago.
In the old days of barbarism, the people fought with hatchets. Civilized men buried the hatchet, and now fight with g
Hello, Thanks for your links to our gadgets at Microsoft Research - also in Cambridge UK. We use sensors for mobile and wearable computers. We are doing experiments on movement sensing and heart rate feeedback for really scary games... more content linked here - www.smartquill.com Lyndsay at Microsoft Research http://www.research.microsoft.com/hwsystems/
I meant that _my_ post was offtopic to the mouse discussion, as it dealt only with screensavers. Sorry for the confusion.
Unfortunately, the intellimouse doesn't like certain switchboxes. I know, I know, it's probably more related to the switchbox than the mouse, but I've _never_ had a Logitech mouse stop functioning with a switchbox. Mike
Sure, I have a thankless job. That's okay. I have a lot of (non
I'm using one right now (to control KDE, take that Bill ;-). It's easily the coolest mouse ever - very smooth movement, nothing to clean. Highly recommended for all geeks.
sounds like a great mouse---until a blind user sits down at the machine and finds that the latest release of her favourite applications is optimised for the mouse rather than her speach-based interface.
Yeah, your entire screen might start to look like this [cheap javascript effects]
Do not use this device if you have a pacemaker or are taking heart medication.
When most people touch the mouse, they can't help but move it. What's keeping the applications of today from having toolbars fade away after an input timeout and come back as soon as the mouse is moved slightly (in most cases, that would be when it's touched).
Is it a cool invention? Sure, it's great to make devices more responsive to natural human movements, but I don't see this as revolutionary... moreover, I stuggle to think of even one piece of real functionality that this mouse would enable, that cannot be done today.
But maybe that's just me...
RP
Other people have touched on the edges of this point, but I'll do my best here to make things clear. Apologies to those who are far more clever than I and have already realized this from the other posts...
This whole fading toolbars issue cannot be implemented efficiently without the use of the touch mouse. The method that is being discussed here is a simple timeout - if the mouse doesn't move within x seconds, then fade the toolbars. Simple enough, and it works. But take a second and imagine yourself *using* a setup like that. (Not Word with millions of widgets, mind you, but something actually useful - say the sidebars in MSDEV. More screen space for your source code, and the sidebars fade in when you move the mouse.) Once you're done with the toolbar and click back to your document, how long is it until the toolbars fade? What does your user do? Sit and wait? Begin editing, only to have things jump around after a few seconds time? Niether possibilities are feasible.
To be a useful feature, the fading effect has to be immediate. The pauses associated with the timeout implementation would break up the fluidity of the UI so much that it would be frustrating.
The touch mouse has merit, and there are definately some useful applications for it. (More so than making the the useless (to 90% of the users) widgets in Word disappear on the fly.)
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
If you want to use the scroller in KDE, get IMWheel.. I use it in KDE 1.1.1 and it works pretty well...
Cheers,
Your Working Boy,
If you look at which toolbar they left open in the picture, you'll see that all the controls that provide visual feedback: font face, bold, justification... And they all fit into a single line!
the ironic part of this device, and the test page for it, is the total and absolute useless clutter they show in the toolbar of MS WORD. how many functions does a damned word processor need and how many of them can readily recognized by a 8x8 pixel icon?! i don't understand 1/5 of the icons i see when i use MS WORD. this is the reason we have pull down menus. they're a good thing. you don't need some $200 mouse to simulate the same thing.
Picture a world of green hills and blue skies. When years from now, Microsoft's business has changed...to focus on... mice. They could be the Logitech of the 21st century. (And hey, I've only had one microsoft mouse that didn't work right, and I've never had one crash...)
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
If nothing else, MS knows how to make mice. I swear by MS mice and havent been swayed by anything else since I tried the first MS mouse. Every other mouse at the time felt cheap and flimsy. I guess what I really liked about it was the weight, it helped it track smooth. Not to mention reliability, every MS mouse I've bought still works to this day (including the first, although it doesn't get much use anymore).
The wheel of course is amazing, to me at least. Yea, its nice when browsing through web pages or a few thousand lines of code, but it really shines in TF. Any serious TF nut will tell you the key to the game is grenades. With the wheel, you can roll up or down to prime either type of grenade, and press it to throw. Deadly.
On a slightly off topic note, has anyone tried their new optical mouse? Is it worth it?
I was going to mention the same thing, but you beat me to it. The product is called FEELit, and SHOULD have been availiable in September - I'm not sure if that's so, I can't find any sign of it.
I also think it would be a really useful thing, one feature the mentioned being possible was having on-screen objects act as mouse "sinks" - you'd feel a pull to the center of the object if you moved over it and could interact with it (like a DnD target or just an Icon you could use). It could even force you away from inactive menus/icons...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
i apologize for the offtopic nature of this response, but what exactly is technocrat.net? is it purposely modeled exactly after the format of slashdot?
..they have in the picrure is ABSOLUTELY AWFUL. It means, every time I touch the mouse, piece of text, previously visible on the screen is going to be obscured by a block of toolbars? What if I am just switching between windows looking at text in them? What if I want to do cut/paste in the area where those toolbars are appearing? What if I just don'r want to move my hand away from mouse if I am not using it for typing?
Why not just use additional buttons instead of wasting them on "zooming" and other pointless operations?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I agree with every word you said. I'm particularly pissed about the "Shop" button on Netscape 4.7 for Linux because it's pushed the "Stop" button so far to the right I can't see it when I have the window at my preferred width (half screen width at 1600x1200). This is a major failure of ergonomics IMO, on top of everything else wrong with it.
As far as IE5 goes, well, all the buttons on my current window have just DISAPPEARED for no apparent reason and I know only too well that I won't be getting them back without a reboot.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
More seriously, how does this work if you're touching the mouse with something non-conductive, like a cast, a prosthesis, or a bandaged hand?
mike
I have to say, it looks like a pretty good idea, but I think having parts of an application appear and disappear would confuse new users. It makes you sigh...
No pad at all. I have run it on:
- the bare desktop
- my pants leg
- a Celtic t-shirt
- the top of my head (not a good idea, too hard to navigate)
- the back cover of a hardware manual which is completely black
So far, nothing has confused it. Except the top of my head a little, since it isn't completely flat. I'm very impressed.Sig broken, watch for
It appears it is for sale after all, but only from Logitech - it also says it is USB and supports only Windows 98. Too bad!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck,
is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners...
"I couldn't give him (Bill Gates) advice in business and he couldn't give me advice in technology." Linus Torvalds
I agree that this would be really useful - others have mentioned the problem of not knowing where a button to press is, which is why you'd probably have the surface use something like a digital ink to define where keys were when you re-mapped the interface and perhaps have a slight "give" to the surface...
Also others have mentioned how double-clicking wouldn't work too well on touchpad. I'd agree, but I don't think you really need to double click - chording of fingers seems a lot more efficient if you have a large area to define control surfaces on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Looks like a neat idea for a desktop machine, but what about laptops? It seems to me, if Microsoft would implement a really good virtual, scrollable desktop like XFree86 has, screen real estate is not such a big deal because I can make the application window bigger than the screen and only view the tool bars on screen when I need them anyway.
The place that this is really necessary is on laptop computers where video memory is usually not plentiful enough to have a huge virtual desktop. However, I can't see why this mouse is really necessary, since the touch pad on a laptop should already have the capability to detect when the user's finger is resting on the touch pad area. Only additional software is needed in this case.
Of course, IBM's Thinkpads with their trackpoint sticks will need some added hardware I think.
The "killer app" described on the Touch Mouse Web page is the ability to "simplify & reduce screen clutter". This is accomplished by removing mouse-oriented UI elements, such as toolbars, whenever the user isn't touching the mouse. Well and good -- except for two things:
1. Almost the same thing is easily accomplished with a non-Touch-Mouse by simply monitoring the time since the last mouse movement. If the user hasn't moved the mouse in, say, five seconds, remove the "extraneous" toolbars. As soon as the user moves the mouse again, fade the toolbars back in. I believe that this is sufficiently similar to the behavior of the Touch Mouse to render the Touch Mouse not really worth the trouble (at least for this purpose).
2. The toolbars aren't necessarily extraneous at all. Many toolbar buttons provide useful visual feedback. For example, in Microsoft Word, one can easily tell whether the current insertion point is in "bold" mode by glancing at the "B" button on the style toolbar, and checking if it's depressed or not.
Comclusion: The Touch Mouse, as presented on the Microsoft Web page, is an interesting idea, but not exactly compelling at this stage.
begin 644
Another possible abuse of such a system is to let go just before a rail blast hits you, then quickly grab the mouse and take them out during the recharge/switch time. Or if you are in the middle of a firefight and you start to loose, you just freeze until people get bored and wander off. I don't think I like that feature much.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The described technology on the Microsoft Research page is said to monitor capacitance over the surface of the mouse to gauge when a user touches it...this in fact is true. But, what is not revealed in the page is that the the surface of the mouse also measures galvanic skin responses.
Imagine being able to judge a users mood as they email tech support, fill out online surveys, or gauge a users response to e-commerce sites.
It's better than cookies, better than spending $$$ on demographics and marketing research, it's MMM MMM GOOD.
Another public service announcement brought to you by the FooGoo Research Project.
This Document shall serve as prior art in the case some hack wants to patent this idea. FooGoo
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
I believe that the screenshot was a dramatization. Sure, Word probably has that many functions, but nobody realistically configures their toolbars like that. (hopefully!)
I really don't see how this is a good idea. I think that the effort could have been better spent at developing a more efficient way to display information and reducing the amount of unecessary clutter that plagues a lot of current designs. We need a way to get rid of the supurfluous controls and displays, not make them blink on and off with alarming frequency.
Instead, we get even MORE things changing on screen than ever before. For the same reason that animated banner ads distract and irritate (O when will Netscape allow you to disable animations? That's one IE5 feature I really did appreciate), the idea that every time I take my hand off the mouse, my display will change and force me to reorient myself, or at the very least, draw my attention away from the text or other item of interest and towards the vanishing/reappearring toolbar bothers me. That's a very distracting way to work. Animated menus are bad enough; a good display should remain as static as possible. Movement is both distracting and hard on the eyes, and an ever-changing display is much harder to learn and become comfortable with than one where the same information is always displayed and displayed in the same places.
Worse, the availability of this kind of feature is liable to encourage people to create even more cluttered and poorly-designed user interfaces, as though they aren't already bad enough. It will be one more excuse to add yet another row of coolbar buttons. At least it will encourage people to keep their hands off the mouse and learn how to use that other thingy that sits next to it with all those letters and numbers.
To me, this seems at best like a kludge to compensate for bad design, and at worse a gimmick that will promote even worse design.
I think it sucks.
I can only imagine the frustration that people in my position will have, once/if these rodents become commonplace. Calls about "Why won't x program let me do this?" from the keyboarders, and "Why does this stuff keep popping up and obscuring my text?" from the mousers.
I shudder to think of how slow software like this would be on less-than-adequate systems (like the 486s that some slobs are still stuck with at work). Maybe I'm being too hard, but I prefer a simple command-line interface, not fading toolboxes combined with hardware that's a little too friendly.
Aw, hell. We all know that whatever the Evil empire wants us to use people will start using. I can live without wheel mice, but now that they're so popular, everyone just *has* to have one. One more frustration in the life of a lowly PC/LAN tech.
At home I used to use full-screen mode because I used a TV as the screen, so not only was I limited to 640x480, but it was a bit fuzzy and a bit far away.
I don't have a point, these are just some stats for you to digest.
Erm, minor point, but...
What the hell does how long it's been since the last code change have to do with anything?
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
I don't like MS Mice. I much prefer the three button logitech mouse. Under Linux three buttons are very handy. Under Windows even the second button is rarely useful. I have on occaision taken the heavy, metal-centered, ball from a MS mouse and put it in a nice three button mouse. MS mice are radically overpriced though they do seem to be well manufactured (in my limited experience). I bought one once. I won't again.
On a serious note, wasn't there a gyroscopic mouse that didn't even need to be on a surface?
Well, then, I guess it depends on the person using the product, and on their personal preferences.
...38 toolbar buttons that I use regularly (once every couple of days or more often). I have my toolbar customized so that only the buttons I find useful (ie: I use them on a regular basis; see above) are there. And there are 38 of them.
Why? Because if I pull up my copy of Word, and count, I get...
*pulls up Word and counts*
Now, granted, it's not as bad as the screenshots they showed, but still, it's more than "one or two," and I, for one, don't find them stupid. I happen to quite like toolbar buttons!
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Has anyone used a mouse with a second, horizontal scroll wheel? What are they like?
Going all the way back to the Z80 softcard for the Apple II, MS has made some damned fine hardware. They really should stick to what they do best, and leave software up to people with taste.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Cyberdildonics -- check out www.ifriends.net. They claim to have "cyberdildonics," whatever the hell that is!
could you detect heart rate, or whether someone is lying?
Actually, that was one of the first things I thought of, with a slight modification, showing varying degrees of Galvonic Skin [Response|Resistance|Whatever the heck it is] instead of the current on/off mode it's in now, you could make a lie detector out of this.
Just think of the tech support possibilities:
"Sir, are you sure you read the manual?"
"Yes"
[computerized graphic of little needle going all over the place]
"LIAR!!"
yes, I meant ctrl-x.. that's what I get for working graveyard shift on only 3 hours sleep ;)
---The proceeding comments were not paid for by the following advertisers.
Well, looks like Microsoft will have even more annoying features to add to Windows 2k. I am imagineing all these features coming together to form one huge piece of Bloatware. I don't want silly features, I want functionality.
I can think of one good thing it can be used for. If these kinds of things become widely used, it could be used in multiplayer gameing. Once the person lets go of the mouse, he freezes, and is inserted into a reduced damage/ invincible state.. Imagine being able to type a message in Tribes, or Quake without having to worry about being fraged.. Of cource this bring up a lot of other problems too. But it seems like a possibility to me. What else would you use somthing like this for?
((Just adding more ideas))
"I couldn't give him (Bill Gates) advice in business and he couldn't give me advice in technology." Linus Torvalds
Sorry ... But is this suppose to be a good thing? Maybe I'm missing something. If I'm not touching my mouse what the hell do I care what is on the screen. Couldn't you do this anyway by monitoring the mouse port.
I may be biased by the Microsoftian nature of this (HA-HA) discovery, but I think this is another excuse to increase the price of a mouse. I saw the light mouse MS invented in a store for 75 bucks! Wow great! Why don't you put a cup holder on it and charge an extra ten bucks.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
As someone else mentioned, Microsoft Research is not "product-focused". They have a 5-10 year outlook. Some of their technology, though, has been incorporated in real Microsoft products. I believe the Office grammar checker, Office paper clip help (not necessarily the paper clip icon, but the "smart" help), and the Microsoft Chat avatars.
cpeterso
I have some problems with this attitude, however; a few months ago, I would have agreed totally, but after talking with some UI fanatic friends of mine, I've changed my views of late.
A good user interface does _not_ throw every option available at the first-time user. Some of the best user interface I've seen have a simple and an advanced mode. If you can't figure out how to turn off advanced mode, you aren't advanced enough to use it. Starting in a more cluttered environment does little to direct the first-time user toward the more common functions.
A good user interface offers visual clues about use; 80 toolbar buttons of equal size and visual weight do nothing to indicate which functions are more appropriate or commonly used. Every default (read: pre-installed) installation of Word I've seen has included enough toolbar buttons to consume a full half of a 640x480 window. What is there to direct the user to the more 'elementary' functions? How does (s)he know which toolbars to eliminate?
Apologies for the off-topic nature of this post, but I have to say I'd rather that UIs be better designed initially than have hardware designed with the express purpose of making up for UI faults.
-chet
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
it works on your windows 95 machine because it had IE 4 installed on it. As standard (win 95 release1 and osr2), with no IE the scroller on the MS mouse does not work. so, get your facts straight, and get a life....
My favorite Wintel text editor already behaves like it uses a touch sensitive mouse. It's called Epsilon - sort of an Emacs for DOS. The mouse arrow appears when you move the mouse, and vanishes when you start typing. The drop down menus only show up when the arrow hits the top of the screen, and also vanish when typing. When I first saw this I thought "Hey, what a flipping good idea! I wish _all_ DOS programs did this." It looks like they will, once M$ forces us into another costly round of hardware/software upgrades.
to chill out. Seriously, he posts too many stories. ./ where worth reading
I remember what it was like backinaday.....
90% of the stories on
A body could actually read _all_ the comments and
{gasp} actually _learn_ something once in a while.
"Quantity has a quality all its own" --Joseph Stalin
I'll make a driver for it...if you really want it! I'd include it in the imwheel package. IMWheel Homepage
-=Long Island Man=-
Microsoft has hired a lot of top people for their Research arm, and they do a lot of cool stuff, but I've yet to hear of anything they are doing making it into a product. There is a story that some research from Microsoft, about 15 years ago, led to a genetic algorithm that found a more efficient way to convert a string of digits to a binary representation, but I can't recall the details. I think Microsoft Research does what they do as a marketing activity, to prove that Microsoft can do "pure" research just like other highly capitalized high-tech businesses.
Microsoft Product divisions are all too busy renaming their distributed object technology, again, to actually integrate any real innovations.
I think that's pretty darned nifty. "Nifty" would
be the important key word here. I think it's
really cool that they can do that, but I fail to
see the point in actually selling this thing. It
seems to me that other than being gimmicky, it
adds nothing new (except, perhaps, another way for
MS to "simplify" things... "Please touch your
mouse to continue..."). Nothing against gimmicks
in general, but for what little it does even as
a gimmick, it just looks like an oppertunity for
my mouse to break a little sooner (and depending
on how well they integrate the "features" that use
this new mouse, a greater chance for Windows and
various proggies to go down like a flaming duck).
In spite of my saying this, I'll probably buy one
the second Logitech duplicates it (with a better
ergonomic design and an extra button).
I don't have a sig, so I'm typing this so you'll think I do.
so what next? Mice sense motion through balls, they can "see" in the case of optical mice, now they can tell when you touch them.
comptuers can take voice commands, so you can possibly use sound instead of a mouse
now all we need is an SmelliMouse
Oh come on, they showed a lot of the buttons at once just to demonstrate their new little toy. Obviously very few people would actually need that many functions, however its nice to have the option to put whatever you want on that toolbar. The last time I checked you could customize the bar to contain as much or as little as you want.
And yes, it is useful to have a word processor that can do a lot of functions. Maybe you don't have a use for that many, but I'm sure there are are other people out there who do.
and how many of them can readily recognized by a 8x8 pixel icon?! i don't understand 1/5 of the icons i see wAhen i use MS WORD. this is the reason we have pull down menus. they're a good thing. you don't need
Its all a matter of how frequently you are using certain tools. Maybe there are people who can and do use all of those little icons. Again, its nice to have the choice.
The point is that, I don't see how you can claim that microsoft created a problem by including all of these features. I mean you can turn them off if you want. Besides, every other piece of software from word perfect to netscape pretty much uses the same style of toolbar.
On the other hand, I do agree that this does seem a little pointless for what would probably be a 200 dollar piece of equipment. Plus I have my own gripes about the usefulness of the example they showed... but those were covered in another post, so never mind with them now.
-- Point? None! Cob.
I posted this because I find it humerous. I am sorry you do not. It was not intended to be my view on the subject. I guess I should have posted anonymous.
"I couldn't give him (Bill Gates) advice in business and he couldn't give me advice in technology." Linus Torvalds
On another note, I think the toolbar invasion is approaching ridiculous levels. There is a point where rolling infrequently-used commands up into a menu is a lot nicer (and more readable) than having to choose what command you want from a display of 80 to 100 tiny 4-bit icons. I'm all for customizability, but when the expectation is for the user to take up 1/3 of the screen with buttons, usability conventions are thrown out the door. The IntelliSensor Mouse with IntelliDirectEye will only promote this type of poor interface and will subsequently scare off the novice users that just want to type a letter.
In sum, this new hardware seems promising for experts, but looks to be the beginning of a disturbing trend to make future computer systems even harder to use than they are today.
As much as I love Linux, I have to say that advanced mouse support is really lacking. Take, for example, the wheel. One can configure applications to use the wheel independently, but where is the overall XFree86 functionality of the wheel? Why won't my wheel mouse scroll ANY window ANYwhere no matter what program is running?
Granted, I'm not complaining. I have my wheel setup to scroll things in Netscape (Most of the time), Emacs, xterms, etc. But, it's a huge pain to configure, unlike the regular buttons which come working right out of the box.
Let's focus on getting solid support for some of the current standards before we concern ourselves with new ones.
I can certainly see how you have a point with compilers, MS does have an advantage. With Office, OK maybe they have an advantage because of bundling, but I have yet to use a spreadsheet that lets me do evrything Excel can. But with mice? How does an OS monopoly lead to success in this area? MS implemented the scolling feature better than anyone else, period.
Spencer Ogden
I can see enourmous potential for some fun with this sort of thing. Know anyone that uses their keyboard more than the mouse? While they are off getting a coffee, if you could set up an audio file to kick in when their hand goes near the thing... 8-)
Mash.
"I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them" Picasso.
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Eh? I think you're missing the fact that you can easily use these mice wheels under Linux/X11 using some very minor tweaks. Check out the mouse howto and the program imwheel.
Scrolling in Netscape with the wheel is very convenient compared to using that dinky Motif scroll bar on the side.
yes, but most WORD users have no idea how to do this. just because you CAN change it doesn't change the fact microsoft is trying to sell people products that necessary only due to the clutter of their own products.
Yes, forget who made the mouse--this is actually really neat technology!
I'd like to see computers and household appliances in general become more user-aware. A mouse that detects you is a start. What about a phone that detects when you're asleep and silently routes calls to your answering machine if you are? And a monitor that's only on if you're sitting in front of it?
Sensitive technology is fun.
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
It runs different articles than Slashdot and has a different theme. It looks something like slashdot, but that will change as the squishdot software evolves.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Um, this is Microsoft, remember? Of course it's going to be overpriced and proprietary! :-)
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.
Microsoft has a distinction called being a "Microsoft Research Fellow" (meant to be a title of distinction - not just joe bloe shmoe). I've attended a couple of lectures by Microsoft Research Fellows in the past and have been amazed at their knowledge - these people are not faking their intelligence.
What I want to know is, if Microsoft has all of these researchers that innovate so well, why can't they get the infrastructure in their own company to funnel this research directly into products? There is no point in letting this research go to waste, which is what I truly believe happens. Or another possibility would be to open up this research - allow other, non-Microsoft intellectuals comment on their research. Yes, this would mean releasing ideas Microsoft could capitalize on in the future, but they don't seem to be doing it anyway, so why not benefit everyone?
- Shaheen
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
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I somehow get the feeling that this would become very annoying very quickly. I absolutely detest when screensavers come on; I have them set to 30min, or 40min or more before I let them activate, because they really piss me off.
It's gotten worse now that I have a TV card; I'm very close to permanently deactivating them totally.
What I'm wondering is how long this'll take before people realize just how annoying this new feature is? I mean, most computer people are, admitedly, control freaks with their computers. How many of them do you think will want half of the controls disappearing off the screen the second they let go of their mouse?!
How about those of us who prefer to use keyboard shortcuts half the time? Will they make us purchase a TouchKeyboard so that the controls will reappear when we touch the alt key..?
And let's not even get started on the confusion this'll cause for newbies..
Maybe someone else will think this is great, but my personal reaction is an emphatic no. I'll agree Microsoft's made some nice mice in their time, but this idea sucks the big one.
(The only use I can think of for this would be on pr0n sites, as a measure for how interested the viewer is in the content. But I doubt Microsoft would want to market it in that manner..)
James
Right now Bill Gates is grinning evilly at his latest attempt to take over the word - mice that record fingerprints!
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could you detect heart rate, or whether someone is lying? those would have excellent UI uses (particularly in the pornsoft industry :)
how about minute differences between people to determine who is using the computer?
Synergies are basically awesome, and they're even better when you leverage them. -PA
As much as I usualy dislike MS OS's, I must admit their input hardware rocks. Currently, I use a MS Natural Elit, an Intellimouse with Wheel, and a Sidewinder pad for games. They are all comfortable, durable, clean up well(sticky fingers and the like), and have nice long cords. ALl in all, I plan to buy more MS input hardware in the near future.
And I beleive they had it after IBM and IBM alone.
Everyone else copied MS after their mouse was successful.
And lets not forget, I've got a MS Mouse reference that is about 5 years old. Microsoft was the FIRST company to actually fit mouse electronics in a mouse, and the first to position the ball in the correct spot. Microsoft has innovated a lot in mouse hardware, lets give them credit for it. Their software may suck (ok, it sucks alot), but really, I use both the MS mice and keyboards and love them.
www.atacomm.com - The Leader in VoIP Product Distributi
A device that attaches to my glasses (sorry you 20/20 people) that pinpoints my mouse position and then responds to a clenching of the teath for a mouse click. Oh what the damage a sneeze could do.
Have you checked out Zoid.com yet? Zoid.com
The great thing about MS menus, and the menus used in KDE and GNOME, is that they provide a hint system for accessesing the functionality of a program for those of us who don't like to touch the mouse for most tasks. By using the Alt Menu accelerators, I can get to that functionality, and see a better shortcut (hopefully) if I need it. So I wouldn't want to see the menus fade away just because my hand avoids the mouse. Toolbars are usually wasted real-estate for applications you use frequently (of course, some interfaces are more natural with the mouse, like gimping, but that's the exception). I'll put it on my to-buy list, there's a spot open right after the wheel mouse. While we're rambling, isn't it funny how MS encouraged 2 button mice over 3 button mice, but now they're adding wheels, touch sensitivity, gas pedals, etc? Pretty soon the damn things will look like the stick in your average figter aircraft. Now that would be a cool interface device. F16 joystick, touch sensitivity, all kinds of buttons and knobs to map to X-events.
XML causes global warming.
What we have here is simply another mouse button. Either you are touching the mouse, or you aren't, so the most you could do is bind one function to "mouse_touchy_touchy". Granted, this mouse button is extremely easy to press, but overall this technology seems sillier than it is nifty.
In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -Carl Sagan
If its PS2 it shouldn't be very hard to reverse engineer... not that I've ever done this myself.
But really, that is insignificant to the amount of cool stuff that somebody said "I want one" about. Lots of stuff I have seen on here with the backing of the Slashdot editors, have been way cooler than that.
However, this makes no sense whatsoever, because it is not only useless, but irritating. Lets say you hold a phone with one hand. You have some information that needs your mouse to be "activated" (oh my lord), and you need to type something. All of the sudden you are going to wish you had a headset or something like that. I would love to hear the author, or anybody else, its a matter of fact, tell me what in the world this thing would be used for.
I still, after all these years have a problem with GUI's (no use in them if you can do it from a console) and utterly this double-clicking, resizing, drag-and-dropping sanctamoneous crap. Excuse my language, but I am really aphauled when things like these reach the "presses".
Next Cool(TM) thing we hear is that Microsoft has built a MS Bobsleigh(R) that they will compete in the Olympics with. It has thermal sensors to detect if there is ice below the skids, made from the same plastic as the mice from Redmond, and of course it runs on Windows CE so that you can steer it. I saw a post about somebody saying "I want the mouse with the paperclip coming up saying that the mouse cursor went in another direction". I agree totally with this person. The only thing Microsoft has ever devised in the later part of this millennium, are useless things like talking paperclips.
This is why I once made the switch to Linux on my PC.
Sincerely, Alexander
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
Well...if it is possible to tell WHERE the mouse is being touched instead of if it is, as a whole, being touched...no more mouse buttons needed, perhaps not even a scroll wheel. Fewer pieces to get crudded up in the middle of that Quake match :) Or imagine if you could actually map buttons to any point on the top/front of the mouse. Hell, imagine a keyboard that could do this. We'd have interfaces that could be remapped on the fly, kinda like in Star Trek TNG. - evilWurst, an idle dreamer
i don't get the mouse wheel sensors though. that could drive someone nuts. every time you go to use the wheel to scroll down, the damn thing goes faster or slower because your finger brushes the sensor as you let off the wheel. (then again, why would you use the wheel for precise scrolling..) that might be better used as a detector for when you want your taskbar or control-panel or whatever to un-hide itself.
i agree that m$ does make good hardware. it's probably the only thing they make that's worth the price they charge.
did anyone check out the rest of the site? SmartSkin and UBook actually look fairly useful, more than a touch mouse anyway.
I have a Honeywell mouse that has no ball but 2 tilted disks on the bottom, one tilted such that it captures vertical movement, the other such that it captures horizontal. I bought it for about AUS$35 3 years ago and have never needed to clean it. It works on just about any surface including my leg when I am deprived of bench space. It has been the innocent outlet (not cause) of much frustration and it still works perfectly.
It is unfortunately only 2 button but I think they make a 3 button version. It is not particularly ergonomic either but I love it.
Why then are there not more of these things around? They solve all the problems with the usual mouse ball and cleaning etc... maybe Honeywell have a patent on it or something???
I got a MS mouse with my last computer and it lasted about a month or two, which most people I know take for granted! A mouse does not have to be a disposable item! Quality units do exist and are worth the price.
thats my 2 bits worth anyway.
with OSS, the reason why you're screwed if the developer doesn't want to implement something is because you're not paying the developer for his work. If I write a program, and someone requests a feature, what incentive do I have to incorperate it? If its a good idea, and I decide I want it too, then sure. But if it won't affect me, why should I waste my time on something that I don't care for. Frequently I and other oss developers do add user requested features that they themselves don't use, but that is because we're nice, and seeing others enjoy our work gives us satisfaction. But let there be no mistake, just because we wrote a program and gave it out for free, doesn't mean we owe you anything. However, I would bet that because oss projects tend to start small, a user has a better chance at having his suggested feature be added (if not, then made into a patch) to the project then if it were a comercial project (even more so if you supply a patch for the suggestion). I'm irritated by your claim that "attitude of 'it's open source, YOU fix it' just isn't right." when it is VERY right. The freedom to directly fix or change something on your own is amzing! If you're too ignorant to make the changes, I have little simpathy. And if you are smart enough to implement your changes, then your changes are still up for peer review to be sure it is the best decision. If its not accpetable, then you can continue offering your change to others. This results in better software, allowing the users/developers (not marketers) to decide what goes into a program.
Well.. ctrl-b, Ctrl-u, Ctrl-i will work to do that with the text in most applications (Damn you Adobe PageMaker) and it is much faster than selecting a button or a menu, course, I have been using those for years. Cut and pasting you have ctrl-c, ctrl-v and ctrl-z (copy, paste, cut respecively) and very few people I have worked with or have seen using word need the usless mousing because it is to much of a hassle to move your hand back to the mouse at 85+wpm.
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I remember seeing someone from the uni im at now demonstrating a prototype of a mouse that actually give the user a differing strength of electric shock as they moved the mouse accross a map.
It was meant to show another element of the map (population density or something i think) that if represented on the screen would make it too cluttered.
When he asked if anyone wanted to try it out, people were not too keen for some reason..
He also had a vibrating mouse based on the same idea.
I know exactly what sort of mouse I want. The trouble is, it doesn`t seem to exist. I want three ordinary buttons on the top, and a scrollbutton at the side for my thumb. I`ve seen all sorts of mice; some of them have thumb-buttons, but none have thumb-scrollers. All the scrollers seem to be in the same place: where the middle mouse button ought to be.
Anyone know of a mouse like this?
My opinion:
/. if one of those looks interesting.
I think the mouse post is actually pretty interesting although it might be more relevant if it wasn't just research and was actually going to be produced sometime soon....I'd definitly be interested.
I'd also have to agree that it's gotten to the point where there's to many stories....I used to actually go to Slashdot and at least read through each abstract but as of last I just go to my "daily page" that gets updated with the headlines once an hour and only come to
In part I'm posting for a totally different reason......I've been wondering how thoroughly these threads are read once the they're more than a few hours old and there's more than 75 posts. I'm guessing a HUGE majority of reader just leave their threshold at 3 or 4 and just read the few posts that make it that high. Anyways, because of that I want to see if anyone would read this much less offer a reply.
-ta dah-
Microsoft always made good mice and hardware in general (friends tell me, their joystick is also wonderful). Microsoft never did made good hardware. I think Bill Gates should switch from selling SW to selling HW - at least they would sell good products.
ms
Why the hell don't you just close the toolbars, or customize them? Customizing a toolbar is simply of dragging the menu item you want onto a toolbar, and tada, it has it's own icon.
If you don't know what the ICON does, then why don't you hover over it? That's what tooltips are for.
It's like saying, UNIX SUCKS, how are people supposed to know what all those stupid CLI commands do? And what's worse, it's hard to find out what they're called.
Yeah, that Evil Microsoft. They'll patent the mouse touch sensor like the patented the mouse wheel.