«
»

a modest proposal

So pparently there’s a new “Open Office” mouse with “… 20 default profiles for popular games and applications, including OpenOffice.org 3.1, Adobe Photoshop, the Gnu Image Manipulation Program, World of Warcraft, and the Call of Duty series.”

http://openofficemouse.com/pr110609.html


When you’ve 18 buttons on a mouse (plus a clickable scroll wheel) it occurs to me that you don’t really have a “mouse” – you’ve got a second keyboard for your right hand that happens to have a movement sensor built in.

…and if you’re going to do that, why not just split your keyboard in half and put movement sensors in both halves? That way you’re not moving your right hand from keyboard A to keyboard B and back again all the time.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 2:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “a modest proposal”

  1. Rob Says:
    November 8th, 2009 at 3:39 pm

    Being a laptop user, I’d go for a line of sight type device to move the cursor and leave the buttons below the keyboard.

  2. nzc Says:
    November 8th, 2009 at 4:01 pm

    I believe the split keyboard with mouse under each half was tried at PARC or someplace, a long time ago. Saw a picture once, in Creative Computing or Byte or something.

  3. Kevin Says:
    November 8th, 2009 at 7:16 pm

    You can get laptop-style keyboards with pimple mouse and trackpad for desktop machines. I use an IBM one at work, and not having to take my right hand off the keyboard to move the cursor is a huge boon to the hands.

  4. Rick Caird Says:
    November 9th, 2009 at 8:53 pm

    Another fine example of mission creep.