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Is the mouse a threatened species?

R

RickNel

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Recently we are getting a lot of threads about mice and mousenalia. Does this reflect a growing sense that the mouse is heading to be exclusively a collectible vintage item?

The manufacturers seem determined to push us all to trackpads, touchscreens and every kind of human interface device except the humble mouse. Personally, I am alienated by every GUI controller ever invented, except for the robust (optical) mouse with scroll wheel, backed up by a graphics tablet for finicky screen drawing. Call me vintage fat-fingers. Multi touch gestures -> multi blunders.

On the positive side, a mouse extinction will enhance the rarity of the several boxes of serial, PS/2 and USB mice that I've accumulated, so I'm treating them with new respect and tenderness.

Rick
 
The Mouse isn't going anywhere if business has its way. We saw trackballs go nowhere in the 90's and trackpads and TrackPoints are annoying enough as-is to use. Using a touchscreen for Microsoft Word or Excel is also tedious.
Why change when the Mouse does everything AND it's easy to use? Marketing just keeps thinking that the mouse is an ugly device and that various gimmicks can replace it. So far nothing has managed to do so that made it successful in business, portable, and home use.

People paying upwards of $50+ for a 25 year old mouse are into something else beyond using it for a daily driver.
 
It's funny, because they keep increasing the resolution of our screens by leaps and bounds, while at the same time *decreasing* the resolution of our input devices (going from a high-DPI mouse cursor to your big fat fingers).

Nothing can truly replace the accuracy and convenience of a mouse yet, especially for precision work; surely not touch pads or touch screens (even with special 'pens'). The mouse+keyboard interface has been with us for more than 30 years, and by now it's been pretty thoroughly fine-tuned for almost every reasonable usage scenario. They're gonna have to try much harder than this if they want to replace it.
 
I've always hated the mouse. It cramps my hand and I don't like how you have to lift and re-centre when you run out of space. I prefer the big trackballs. I've liked those ever since I played Centipede in 1980.

I thought I'd like touchpads, but quickly discovered that they're very annoying - too many accidental double-clicks (who the hell thought tapping as double-click would be a good idea??). It also has that mouse problem of having to re-centre. I thought touchpads were a recent invention, but I saw one in a 1979 BYTE magazine. They took a while to catch on.

Touchscreen is too inaccurate. About the only "touch" input I like is pen-input, like on the Samsung Note II. It's still a bit "touchy", but much more accurate than using your finger.
 
Mr.Amiga500 said:
I've always hated the mouse. It cramps my hand and I don't like how you have to lift and re-centre when you run out of space. I prefer the big trackballs. I've liked those ever since I played Centipede in 1980.
Click to expand...

I've got a TrueDOX Trackball with manual and software if you're interested. It uses any serial port. It's like this one although this one is not mine and mine has been tested and works fine:


http://www.ebay.com/itm/Amiga-Commo...Accessories&hash=item51ac98717c#ht_2746wt_970
 
Stone said:
I've got a TrueDOX Trackball with manual and software if you're interested. It uses any serial port. It's like this one although this one is not mine and mine has been tested and works fine:


http://www.ebay.com/itm/Amiga-Commo...Accessories&hash=item51ac98717c#ht_2746wt_970
Click to expand...

No thanks. I've already got a few trackballs for my Amigas.

I use trackballs on every computer that has a GUI - Amiga, classic Mac, PC running BeOS, OSX. I even have an Atari trackball. (..for playing Centipede)

The only computer I don't yet have a trackball for is my NeXTstation - but I've read that CH Products made a NeXT-compatible trackball and I'd love to find one of those.
 
Before the mouse, there was the light pen. Sounds like a great idea--and may well be for many situations, but for frequent use, it's awkward. At some point, I was doing a lot of mousing and suffering RSD. I moved to a large (billard-ball sized) trackball (CH Products), but it was difficult to be precise with it. I used touchpad for awhile, but found it too imprecise. I recall that someone even had a disk-shaped sort of thing that was operated with the feet--it might still be out there.

But I keep coming back to the mouse. The trick to RSD was to be ambidextrous. I now most commonly operate the mouse with my left hand.

I think it's interesting that most Hollywood computer setups rarely show anyone using a mouse--it's almost always all keyboard.
 
Don't know about anyone else, but I can't stand the idea of having to do my work while staring through my own bacon grease.

Touchpads have the advantage that they are very resistant to dirt and sand. They can be used in environments where a mouse or trackball wouldn't last nearly as long. When you are talking about something that is built in to a ~$1000 piece of equipment, longevity is important. The disadvantage is that it is not as easy to use.

For desktop systems, mice have thrived partly because they are inexpensive, easily replaceable input devices. I can replace a mouse or keyboard for around $5. You can't say that about touch screens. But perhaps that is the whole idea, the big corps would be more than happy to sell you expensive replacements or repairs.

In a way, this entire push for touch screens reminds me of the introduction of the mouse. There was actually some resistance initially. Die-hard word processing folks might swear they would never lift their hands from the keyboard. And on the other side, the Macintosh could be almost entirely operated without a keyboard. Keyboards didn't disappear.

And since everyone else is posting pictures of their mice :D :
visionmouse1.jpg
 
My question would be, do you teach the device to understand you, or do you have to learn what the device can understand?

Being advertised for "pre-orders" makes me cautious - by habit I am a late-adopter.

In any case, I'm not sure that I would want some of the gestures I make at my screen to be interpreted by a machine - it might hit back. ;)

Rick
 
There is only one gesture I make towards my computer, and I doubt any OS will recognise it anytime soon.

Edit: damn, just realised RickNel beat me to that line, so on topic I think the mouse will be around for more years yet - we seem to be heading towards a world of touch more than anything - but there are certain ergonomic issues there. That geasture without touching could work well, until your co-worker sneaks up behind and logs you in to some freaky website at least! We have Kinect on our Xbox at home, which does the same, but not quite accurate enough to be used to run Windows.
 
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I have tried all kinds of pointing devices, but always go back to a mouse. Trackballs get annoying. The mouse was prefect (in my opinion) when optical mice came out. There is nothing more smooth and precise as a high resolution optical mouse, and there are no balls to clean.

Someday we will have a clip on eye tracking motion monitor on our LCD screens that you can use as a mouse while the normal mouse keys will be on the keyboard (so you can use both hands to type and they don't have to leave the keyboard).
 
I actually used a Rat of sorts, that thing was pretty good; Foot operated - it had two kinds of pedals, one that tilted around and moved the cursor whilst the other could be tilted forward to click. There were many variants though including large trackball type devices and more pedals.

Unfortunately, it wasn't mine, but I sure as hell wanted one, I could type whilst moving the cursor around the screen with that. Probably helps that I used to play synthesizer though.

I can't see the mouse leaving, it might disappear from the PC (Content Consumption) wheras I can't see it going anywhere on the Workstaion (Content Creation) as, say, as CAD user needs the precision and consistency. Luckily I always use workstation-class hardware.
 
I often wish that the mouse would curl up and die. Since when did we have three hands? I know that it can be useful in some circumstances, but there used to be many really well designed interfaces where you never had to leave the keyboard and hence were much faster and more comfortable. A good example is Lotus-123: You used the / command to enter the menu. Once in the menu it was a single key press to each item which was displayed clearly on the screen; you didn't have to remember them all, but once you had learnt them, then you didn't need to look and could just press the keys to do what you wanted very quickly. Almost perfect and I think a lot more productive than windowed excel with all that moving from keyboard to mouse and back. I know that a decent keyboard driven interface could be given to an app with a GUI, but I rarely see any that come close to many in the textmode era.
 
I know of a couple of Windows products that started out as "you don't need a mouse; there are keyboard shortcuts", but then, within a couple of versions, made it clear that a mouse was very necessary. It seems that as you add features, it becomes too difficult to map everything to keyboard shortcuts.

That's a shame--perhaps our programs should be simpler.
 
IMHO the prize for greatest elaboration of keyboard commands would have to be the EMACS *nix editor - I believe there are more than a hundred. For a while I used a vector graphics program that was entirely keyboard-driven (but limited). Wordstar had some dozens of 3-key commands, some of which changed with context, which could be tricky. I recently had cause to dive back into WordStar after a 20-year absence and found it quite a challenge, although before GUIs appeared I used it every day. The DOS versions of MS Word used keys and drop-down menus, which seemed like magic at the time.

Rick
 
el_VR said:
It's funny, because they keep increasing the resolution of our screens by leaps and bounds
Click to expand...

I wish that were true, but my 2048x1536 NEC FP2141SB is still higher res than any modern screen I can find. Almost everything does 1080, you can get 1440 lines if you pay through the nose. IBM used to make a good high-res LCD's, but not anymore.

Chuck(G) said:
I know of a couple of Windows products that started out as "you don't need a mouse; there are keyboard shortcuts", but then, within a couple of versions, made it clear that a mouse was very necessary. It seems that as you add features, it becomes too difficult to map everything to keyboard shortcuts.

That's a shame--perhaps our programs should be simpler.
Click to expand...

Or driven from the command line...
 
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