back to article WarMouse pushes gamers' buttons with OOMouse

WarMouse plans to ship a multi-button office application mouse by February next year. The outfit said it would start taking orders for the pointing device, which comes loaded with 18 chunky programmable buttons and is intended for use by OpenOffice.org fans and gamers, next month. OOMouse features a shedload of inputs. The 18 …

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  1. Poor Coco
    Thumb Down

    Oy vay!

    That is the most ridiculous device I have ever seen... including Doug Engelbart's five-key "chorded" keyboard replacement idea from ca. 1972, which worked by typing binary ASCII codes — and which was downright simple-looking compared to that monstrosity!

    "Let's see... to do function X I need to upper-centre-right-double-click".... why do I already have a migraine?

  2. The BigYin
    FAIL

    No

    That's all "No". It looks shit, will probably feel shit and is has a wire. Urgh. Like their interface, this mouse looks like "Attack of the Worst of the 90s". They should spend less time feckin' around with crap like this and more time ironing all the simple, and bloody annoying, bugs in their software.

  3. paul brain
    WTF?

    April fool ?

    Less is more.

  4. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Weird?

    I just had to check that it isn't April 1st? What a strange piece of kit.

  6. Ray0x6

    Awesome. Want.

    I hope they provide one without the really naff logo, though.

  7. Bug

    Asthetics?

    This is the only article I've seen which hasn't commented on the aesthetics of the device and felt the need to point out that it's not a joke.

    It's a nice idea, it's just a shame they've managed to make something which looks so bloody awful.

  8. Mage Silver badge
    FAIL

    At least

    It's not included and you don't have to buy it.

    There is nothing wrong with a wire though.

    Wireless mice are pointless waste of spectrum. I've had many problems with mouse over last 20 years, the wire isn't one of them.

    I'd be surprised if this is popular. A tad too many buttons. but then I never use F1 to F12, Pause, Break, Scroll Lock, Sys Req on my keyboard.

    Insert, Home, end rarely used.

    The key the menu and key with a window are never used.

    AEOHNRTS "left Shift" are starting to fade a bit on this 8 year old keyboard.

  9. ThomH

    Hahaha

    More buttons = more user friendly, right? That's what I learnt from OpenOffice.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Obvious practical joke...

    ...is obvious.

  11. sandman
    Thumb Down

    RSI Special

    Why in the name of Satan and all his little imps (TM Blackadder) would I want a mouse with almost as many buttons as a keyboard? That really looks like an RSI special - you should be giving your mouse hand a break, not making even more tiny repetitive motions. Interesting opposing viewpoints though, an Apple mouse with 0 buttons (at least visually) and that thing with a lot. Think I'll stick to a penpad.

  12. Sceptical Bastard
    FAIL

    Eighteen?

    What about us arthritic old geezers? I can barely deal with two buttons - add a scroll-wheel and I'm fucked.

    Why not just put a couple of roller unders the keyboard then we could enjoy a 104-button mouse.

    Fail.

  13. Entropy 1
    FAIL

    Lame

    Probably works ok, looks old and shit.

    Funny how you can use that to describe both OpenOffice and the Open ffice Mouse..

  14. Jango
    FAIL

    Epic Fail

    Did they really have to make it as clumsy as OpenOffice? Haven't they heard of Keep It Simple Stupid

  15. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    But..

    ..where do I plug in the nunchuck?

  16. PirateSlayer
    Megaphone

    @Big Yin: The Wire

    I have to say I love wired mice. Nothing worse than a cacky wireless device that manges to cache the input instead of interupting and getting it done right away! I am sticking with wires until that never, ever happens again.

    Also batteries for the fail.

  17. Rob 101

    The office mouse has been done before

    And far better by A4Tech: http://i1.lelong.com.my/UserImages/Items/0802/22/syslantech@13.jpg

    Great to use though even then I could not be bothered to add in any additional button functionality because, fankly, it was not worth it. I can see some people may use more but this OO one is just ridiculous.

    I just set one of the side buttons as PTT button in teamspeak back in the days when SWG was worth playing.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Scary!

    My first PC only had 512k system memory, now the pigging mouse has that!

    Looks a bit bulky, but would be interesting to play an FPS with it.

  19. Ralph B
    Linux

    Not Enough Buttons

    I want an optical mouse built in to the underside of my keyboard. I an a Linux user and I want a huge mouse that needs two hands to operate it. Maybe I want a printer built into it too. I'll get back to you on that.

  20. The Commenter formally known as Matt
    Stop

    Looked at the photo

    I feel sick

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    7 months late / 5 months early

    ...obviously, but it still gave me a hearty laugh.

  22. Bilgepipe
    FAIL

    Gah!

    That's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. It looks like it should be called Fisher Price My First Mouse or something.

    And a wire? That's so early-90's.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    No

    That looks bad. I can see why more buttons would be useful, but that looks terrible and doesn't appear to be very usable. Judging from the ridiculously high price, they don't expect to sell very many.

    I think Sun should stick to designing server hardware, or should hire an external design team that know what they're doing. They took an excellent idea and did THAT with it :P

  24. Bumhug
    FAIL

    Aimed at gamers, really?

    "Adjustable resolution from 400 to 1,600 CPI"

    So by gamers they mean people who play solitaire and the odd the odd facebook game then

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    It's ugly and dirty, and perfect.

    This reminds me of the 'nuts and bolts' system used by us aircraft-carriers to keep tabs on the aircraft on various parts of the ship (presuming that isn't just a urban myth); build something which does what it's supposed to and does it well, estetics can go f itself.

    I don't know about using it in an office application where I'd imagine you would use the keyboard more than the mouse, but I'm sitting here wondering if I could use this with Photoshop, and how much time I could save by not having to go into the bloody menu for every option (clone this, paint over that, cut this, pipette that colour, burn that, etc).

    Not to mention once I got used to it I would no longer need that pesky selection menu = more screen realestate for me to work on.

    Seriously, give adobe a call and get support out of the box for this for their next iteration of their creative suite.

    Jobbie, because a 1 button mouse is not a graphic designers best friend.

    Peace.

  26. Ian Stephenson
    Thumb Down

    Looks like the joystick is on the left...

    Right where the palm of a left hander would be (Yes I do use a mouse left handed - right hand on keypad for spreadsheets.)

    So I hope they are doing a left hander version.

    Icon - well this is discrimination! I demand a left handed thumb up and thumb down icon!

  27. Ian Ferguson
    FAIL

    Welcome to the 90s, OOo

    Will they discover wireless next? Ooh and then invent an ergonomic mouse that curves with your hand...

  28. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    lolz

    They've invented... the keyboard.

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Arrgh - My Eyes!

    Will it be known as "The carpaliser"?

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    OGOD

    Put it back in, it's not done yet.

    "intended for use by OpenOffice fans and gamers"

    If you drew a venn diagram of those two groups you would find maybe one person who belongs to both.

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Erm...

    WTactualF?

    That looks horrid, and as ergonomic as a bog brush. I will stick to a Razer thingy for my gaming thanks, and tend to use keyboard shortcuts for word processing...

  32. Bassey

    Re: Paul Brain, Less is More

    Excellent. That's means I have shit loads of money!

  33. Gary F
    FAIL

    That would kill me

    After 27 years of computing my mouse hand is only a few years away from retrirement on the grounds of RSI and CTS. The latter is far worse than CTS and why I use a vertical mouse.

    The OOMouse is hideous and for the sake of RSI and CTS should not be considered. As much as I love Sir Clive Sinclair why did they ask him to design it? (That was sarcasm)

  34. phoenix
    Flame

    Be afraid. Be very afraid

    or horrified , sick , to your pick. Might burn well

  35. AJ MacLeod

    Excel?

    You kind of spoiled it with the quote supposedly from OOorg which talks about using Excel spreadsheets...

  36. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @wireless mouse twonks

    I guess all you IT professionals out there don't use KVM's then...

  37. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Errrrmmmm ...

    What's a "mouse"?

  38. rhydy
    Joke

    bring it on

    I am so excited, I love OO. I have already planned the profile I will use with it though, the 8 buttons on the left will be "select" and the 8 buttons on the right will be "context menu".

  39. Illsay

    I am trying, honest!

    I so want to believe them, but why do they have to make it extraspecial difficult? With the emphasis on cult.

  40. rhydy

    OGOD

    "if you drew a venn diagram of those two groups you would find maybe one person who belongs to both."

    Agree, totally different demographics, however that still leaves a huge group of people who will want the mouse to maximise the opporutnities of evangelising to people nearby about how much more productive they are with open source software, and another even bigger group who want to be able to select "attack opponent with turnip enema" and "jump while looking left" and reloading weapon at the same time without needing to take the hand off the mouse. In which case it could sell in some numbers, even if it does look like the lvoe child of a scroll mouse and a ZX80.

  41. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Why not just put an optical sensor under the keyboard then?

    Stupid OOo, fix your dodgy crap software first!

  42. collateral damage
    Thumb Down

    One word:

    wrong!

  43. Rob Moir
    FAIL

    Monument

    It's like they've built a monument to why open source software usability sucks. How OpenOffice can want any involvement in this and then expect their UI design chops to be taken seriously is beyond me.

  44. jubtastic1
    WTF?

    I love this

    "And with just a click of the second button of the third row on the right hand side *click* I've switched to the oh, wait, sorry that only works in OODraw, let me just undo that with a *click* on the BUGGER!, no that was my fault, I knocked the joystick.. *click* and... *click* just a sec... *click* and there you go, rectangle tool selected!"

  45. The BigYin

    @AC 15:28

    Not for a few years actually. Now I use Synergy+ over SSH.

    And seeing as OOo is a desktop app, I don't see that you'd really be using this monstrosity of a pointing device in an area where you'd need a KVM, or where something like Synergy+ wouldn't actually be better.

    My dislike of wired mice is my personal choice; you are free to have your own choice.

    No need to get all upset about it.

  46. wsm
    Thumb Down

    Who, how, what???

    Design by committee, perhaps?

    This is the first mouse I have seen that needs a mouse to operate it.

  47. fifi
    FAIL

    spoof?

    When I saw a picture of this at the end of last week, I thought it was a spoof.

    Please tell me it's not so! :|

  48. Stevie

    Er...

    I was caught hook, line and sinker until I read the price. 75 bux for a corded mouse? Totally unbelievable. Who'd pay that in this day and age?

    Do yourselves a favour and pull the price out of the article. It ruins the joke.

  49. /dev/me
    Thumb Up

    Heh...

    I kinda like it

    I hate switching between keyboard and mouse as input device for my right hand. This seems to be not a bad idea to solve this.

  50. Jenkins
    Thumb Up

    I approve of this product and/or service

    What? It's good!

    How can 52 simultaneous on-mouse commands possibly not be good.

    Only thing is the colour scheme...does look a bit naff.

    Lose the branding, and make it black or wenge with silver or chrome detail and I'll buy it tomorrow...

  51. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    all i have to say

    If it can't beat Chuck Norris it isn't worth rat spit.

  52. Joe User

    Hideous

    OOMouse? They should have named it the "EeeuuwMouse". What a p.o.s.

  53. transientcylon
    Thumb Down

    Huh?

    And I'm sure some lawyer is already readying the class action lawsuit for sufferers of the newly discovered OOHand Syndrome... what a beast!

  54. Jeff F.
    Unhappy

    Late to market as usual

    The future of a mouse is one that doesn't need to rest on a surface at all, like the Philips Speechmike. The programmable buttons on mine with the scroll wheel, and controls for zoom, page back, and other stuff make working a computer as easy as watching TV and changing the channel!

  55. stizzleswick
    Coat

    This is...

    ...ridiculous. I remember a nine-button mouse was on the market sometime in the mid-90s; the manufacturer went bankrupt IIRC. Thing is, power users use keyboard shortcuts (especially when using the Creative Suite... honestly, I have no idea where in the menus most of the functions I use in InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator are; I hardly ever see the menus). An 18-button mouse is simply counterproductive in an production environment. Maybe it's something gamers can use; I wouldn't know: I tend to use the keyboard as my game controller...

    Mine's the one with the tablet pen sticking out of the pocket.

  56. Sarah Davis
    FAIL

    OOoooo thats pointless

    pointless - gettit, coz its a mouse and it,... oh never mind

    it's also stupid, i like multi-button mice, in fact i wish there were more on the market, well, some decently designed ones would be nice, but 18 buttons, and 'wired' !!! thats utterly stupid with a capitol STU. 7 or 8 buttons is the max you can have with ease of use and still keep it ergonomic and it must be wireless (does anyone use or even make corded mice anymore??). I like Open Office but guys c'mon, get your heads out of there, clearly it's too dark for you to see sense

  57. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    the prototype

    If you think it looks bad you should have seen the prototype:

    http://www.beardyweirdy.co.uk/oomouseprototype.png

  58. Eddie Johnson
    Coffee/keyboard

    This is hilarious

    I take it as a tacit acknowledgment of how many keystrokes it takes to do some fundamentally simple things in OO. Things like inserting the current date (Insert/Fields/Other/Filename/[Choose Format]/Insert/Close), or adding page numbers to documents which shouldn't require 10 mouse clicks. Things I could do 10 years ago in WordPerfect with 2-3 keystrokes require 15 minutes in OO. Not that its their fault, OO copied Microsoft's broken model.

    Yeah, I know, I can spend hours configuring autocomplete to do all this for me, only to have it made incompatible and obsolete by the new version released a month later.

  59. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    After a close look at the picture...

    All I can say is welcome to our seven-fingered overlords (and a thumb).

  60. sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD
    Thumb Up

    ZOMG...

    I wanna test drive one immediately.

    It might drive like crap but I reckon I won't know how it feels till I try one out.

    Aesthetically, there is a lot to be desired but... look at all those buttons! Heavens knows I don't have enough buttons on my logitech to pWNz0r n00bz0rs with.

  61. zedenne
    Alert

    what's all this moanin about wires?

    in my experience wireless jobbies are a pin in the preverbial.

    they're heavier to use so slow you down and have annoying side effects like the batteries running out.

    simple optical wired mouse: plug in. forget for at least 5 years.

  62. Goat Jam
    FAIL

    Typing

    Is done on the keyboard, no? So, if I have my hands on the keyboard, why would I want to move my hand to the mouse just to hit a "shortcut" button?

    < - - - -

  63. James O'Brien
    Joke

    ROFL

    This is great. Never in my life have I seen a product this badly designed. And there are some bad ones out there but this really has to take the cake. I cant see how this can make "ANYTHING" faster in the office.

    "Ok which button was select again? Was is button 1 row 1 or button 3 row 4? I cant bloody remember?"

  64. Anonymous Coward
    Troll

    Hahahahaha

    ... and they wonder why OOo hasn't replaced MS Office. muppets!

  65. Alan Newbury
    FAIL

    It's third party

    And at the recent OOo conference thingy, the guy who came up with it was requested (read 'told') not to use the Open Office name or logo with it, hence it's now an OOMouse.

    Fail for Reg reporting not being able to keep up with reality...

  66. Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
    Paris Hilton

    Not enough buttons

    I think they should have put 103 buttons on the mouse.......

    Paris, she pushes my buttons

  67. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    hmmm

    I think it has enough buttons to write Japanese.a,i,e,u,o k,s,t,m,n,h,y,r,w confirm and - then the scrollie to pick script. You'd never need to use your wrist again lol.

    As an aside, wired mice have their place, namely on all my computers becouse they're light, and work, all the time. Nice. I use a wireless keyboard but binned the mouse.

  68. A J Stiles
    Go

    Don't knock it till you've tried it

    If it can do cool stuff like dissociate the mouse cursor from the typing cursor, so you can copy text from somewhere without losing your place and paste it at the current location (like pico in an xterm), it might not be so bad after all.

    And I'd rather learn what several buttons do *once*, than have to select from a menu *every* time.

  69. swaygeo
    Happy

    DIY option...

    ...I have replicated this mouse simply with a regular keyboard, regular mouse, and some blu-tac.

    Obviously though I had to improve it further by adding a couple of cup holders, a pen pot, an in-tray, a printer, and a nodding dog.

    And some casters.

  70. Jon 52

    don't knock it on looks

    Why are the same poeple who have a go at firefox for being form over function saying so much about how this looks.

    Also give me a wired mouse anyday, no batteries to go, no waste of spectrum or random times when it can't be bothered to move.

  71. Brennan Young
    Thumb Up

    conservative reg readers

    Amazing how conservative you folks are.

    Yes, it looks ugly, but the way I see it, there should be at least as many buttons on a mouse as you have fingers. Any less is missing a trick.

    Nobody is forcing anyone to buy this device, and let's face it, the scroll wheel is the first innovation in mouse design since Engelbart's 1968 original. (Why has nobody thought of making the ubiquitous office swivel chair into an input device?) Engelbart also devised several other 'no-brainers' including the ancestor of Endfield's Microwriter which have not caught on. Users were able to achieve extremely high typing speeds on those 'finger-chord' keyboards' ridiculed by 'Poor Coco' above, who clearly has no idea that they used a mnemonic finger pattern system, rather like sign-language, and not ascii codes. Once there was a good excuse why such innovations did not catch on (expense and lack of standards), but now we have USB.

    BTW did anyone try the Oberon operating system? (Circa 1987). It used an ingenious 'chording' system with its three mouse buttons: Hold down one button while clicking another and you 'copy' the selection to the clipboard, for example. They also used up to four cursors. One for 'source parameter' one for 'target object', one for 'selecting' and one for 'execute'. It might not be the best design, but at least Wirth and co were thinking out of the box.

    The mouse and the keyboard are the computer's primary 'sensory organs'. Should innovators not work to increase the bandwidth of their inputs? Increasing resolution of the motion sensors is one thing, but why not have pressure sensitive or velocity sensitive buttons? (256 levels of force? Dynamic Photoshop brush sizes? Wacom do this already and it's very, very cool). Imagine a keyboard where you could press harder for bold text etc.

    There are many possibilities, but little real innovation. It doesn't help to have a gaggle of IT 'experts' who dismiss any attempt to design something new without actually trying it in their hands - which is what input devices ultimately stand or fall on.

    If the OO mouse were the first of many design iterations, I think we would soon arrive at a really good input device. Yes, it looks absurd, but you have to start somewhere - and I think we are seeing the old cliché: innovators are invariably ridiculed until everyone realises the idea was always brilliant.

    (How many here will admit to ridiculing the iPod because it lacked a radio? Well, I remember a vast clamour of voices with exactly that opinion. Yeah, I know... It was a long time ago, I never saw any Jews being mistreated... We didn't know what was going on... I can't really remember.... etc.)

    I definitely use the 'home', 'page down' and 'page up' keys at least as much as I use the scroll wheel, probably more. Perhaps some of you minimalist/conservatives would rather have the scroll wheel on the keyboard too? Beside the page down' and 'page up' keys would be an 'obvious' place, no?

    The real issue is the driver configuration software. Many logitech mice have 5 or more buttons, but the opportunities for configuring those buttons are ridiculously limited. Kensington mice have superb drivers, with finely tuned acceleration control and a proper macro editor but they seem to be going in Apple's direction of 'less is more' in their hardware designs.

    So... why not TRY the device before leaping to any 'brilliant' and 'witty' conclusions.

  72. Shadowslayer19
    IT Angle

    GREAT idea...

    How would you hold that? They said something like how the buttons were the same size as the buttons on a phone, but those work from your thumb, not your index, middle, and ring finger.

    I thought it would have been fine if they moved the buttons all around, like pushing your palm down will set off one button, but even that seems sketchy.

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