Friday
Apr162010
What’s so wrong with a mouse?
Friday, April 16, 2010 at 9:54AM
Back in 1996 or so I was sitting in the front row of the old Aladdin hotel in Las Vegas, listening to Bill Gates give the keynote address at Comdex. For those of you of a tender age Comdex was once the biggest business convention in the world, five days of madness in which as many as a couple of hundred thousand people would descend on Vegas to find out what was going in the world of technology.
Gates talked about the future. I wish I had a video of that now. The future was bright and shiny. We'd have a new 'input device' for the things around us, and it would be the human voice. Computer... find me a hotel in Schenectady, not more than $75 a night with a view. Computer... track down Bernie and inform him he's fired. Computer... you get the drift.
Fourteen years on and we still can't do that. Instead we're looking at a new 'paradigm' for telling our machines what to do. The iPad typifies it as this excellent piece from Cult of Mac demonstrates For Writing and Real Work, iPad Needs a Keyboard Dock [Review] | Cult of Mac]
It's called touching the screen. Don't faff with the mouse. Just waggle your finger around the monitor instead. And note that, at the moment, that's all you can do with the iPad. There is no option for a mouse, though surely one will appear.
Would you want to write with a setup like this? Not me. The point about the iPad is it's light and portable. That ceases to be of much use if you have to lug around a dock and a Bluetooth keyboard too. Yes, I know they don't weigh much. But it's three bits of kit, any of which you can drop or lose. How is this better than a laptop when it comes to work (I'm not talking about doing all that content stuff the iPad's supposed to be good for here -- I'm talking about input)?
Worse though, for me anyway, is that loss of a mouse and its replacement with a touchscreen. A phone with a touchscreen is fine -- my HTC Desire works very well like that. But a computer screen?
Two issues...
I spend a lot of time at the computer. Ergonomics are important to me. I currently use a standard Apple wired keyboard (the wireless one is too small) and a Logitech Performance wireless mouse. That's a clever mouse, and fits my hand a lot better than Apple's wireless one. It can do mouse things, search on words, move backwards and forwards in pages, all sorts of stuff...
Why would I abandon that for running my grubby fingers across a screen only to get bugged by the smears there?
Touchscreens seem to be all the rage. HP are among those bringing out desktop models for Windows users like this Touchsmart 600 which will cost you around £1200.
This does have a mouse of course. But you're still meant to sit there flicking through pictures and stuff too, getting arm ache along the way and probably having the screen an awkward distance away to see properly.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. But what exactly is wrong with a mouse?
Gates talked about the future. I wish I had a video of that now. The future was bright and shiny. We'd have a new 'input device' for the things around us, and it would be the human voice. Computer... find me a hotel in Schenectady, not more than $75 a night with a view. Computer... track down Bernie and inform him he's fired. Computer... you get the drift.
Fourteen years on and we still can't do that. Instead we're looking at a new 'paradigm' for telling our machines what to do. The iPad typifies it as this excellent piece from Cult of Mac demonstrates For Writing and Real Work, iPad Needs a Keyboard Dock [Review] | Cult of Mac]
It's called touching the screen. Don't faff with the mouse. Just waggle your finger around the monitor instead. And note that, at the moment, that's all you can do with the iPad. There is no option for a mouse, though surely one will appear.
Would you want to write with a setup like this? Not me. The point about the iPad is it's light and portable. That ceases to be of much use if you have to lug around a dock and a Bluetooth keyboard too. Yes, I know they don't weigh much. But it's three bits of kit, any of which you can drop or lose. How is this better than a laptop when it comes to work (I'm not talking about doing all that content stuff the iPad's supposed to be good for here -- I'm talking about input)?
Worse though, for me anyway, is that loss of a mouse and its replacement with a touchscreen. A phone with a touchscreen is fine -- my HTC Desire works very well like that. But a computer screen?
Two issues...
- You get grubby finger marks all over it which, after a while, will annoy the hell out of you. Take a look at this demo here and ask yourself: how smeared would the screen be after a few goes of that?
- Reaching up and running your finger around a screen like this is more work than a mouse, not less
I spend a lot of time at the computer. Ergonomics are important to me. I currently use a standard Apple wired keyboard (the wireless one is too small) and a Logitech Performance wireless mouse. That's a clever mouse, and fits my hand a lot better than Apple's wireless one. It can do mouse things, search on words, move backwards and forwards in pages, all sorts of stuff...
Why would I abandon that for running my grubby fingers across a screen only to get bugged by the smears there?
Touchscreens seem to be all the rage. HP are among those bringing out desktop models for Windows users like this Touchsmart 600 which will cost you around £1200.
This does have a mouse of course. But you're still meant to sit there flicking through pictures and stuff too, getting arm ache along the way and probably having the screen an awkward distance away to see properly.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. But what exactly is wrong with a mouse?
Reader Comments (8)
http://scobleizer.com/2010/02/08/why-if-you-miss-siri-youll-miss-the-future-of-the-web/
See, the future is happening :)
It seems strange to refer to being old fashioned in connection with preferring a device that is a relatively recent development. When it came along it was a new way of interfacing with the computer and took a while to learn properly. I see older (and younger) members of my family still struggling to use it as it feels unnatural - a fixed trackball would probably be an easier system than a mouse for them.
But touch is more natural still. For some tasks. Browsing, flicking through photos, exploring maps - these are great using touch. I couldn't do my job entirely without a mouse although for the most part I prefer shortcut keys. The mouse for me tends to slow me down. I'd be lost without ctrl+tab, alt+tab and all the other, learned functions of life in front of a computer.
From everything I have read, the iPad still has a way to go in developing its keyboard functionality to enable us to fully let go of the mouse.
Or maybe someone has developed a mouse app :)
Yep - Siri is exactly what Gates demoed in 1996. Would be nice if it turned up. I'm with you on shortcut keys, and yes there may be physical alternatives to a mouse - better trackpads for one, maybe built into the keyboard. Given lots of people never use anything but a laptop any more we're part way there.
I still struggle with the touchscreen as a complete replacement for the reasons above, and more too. For one thing a touchscreen involves more glass in the screen so the image is rarely as good as a non touchscreen monitor. I also think the distance between user and screen needs to be shorter. If you look at that HP demo video I link to above -- I couldn't write with the screen that close. It would feel wrong. Writing and fiddling around with photos are different.
Maybe designers would feel differently of course.
My worst nightmare (forgive the hyperbole) is the sort of interface touch could lead to - the Minority Report nonsense. Now THAT looks tiring but it could be the next big thing if the Microsoft Natal proves popular.
Shudder..... Tom Cruise would get very tired little arms if he tried that now
The absolute worst offender, by the way, is NCIS: Los Angeles for annoying use of touch screen. Painful. I would say that you really need to wait to see what developers actually do with new technology before you judge it, because they tend to be way better at imagining realistic uses for fancy interfaces. I mean, even if dictation is a horrible, horrible way to control a desktop, it turns about to be a great way to control GPS (like SYNC). I actually love using the iPad for OmniGraffle and drawing, but I really just got one because of my faith in what third-party developers will come up with in 6 months after using the new hardware.
>>>There is no option for a mouse, though surely one will appear.
We don't know that. I haven't seen anyone try to pair a mouse with it. WinMob and Android both give mouse pointers when paired.
And, puhleeze, the Keyboard Dock has dedicated keys so you don't have to touch the fekkin screen at all while using it.
You just want to add more fuel for me to burn on the day when I get an iPad.
This is going to be one helluva bonfire!
I bet you can't edit a document easily without touching the screen. You can't edit a document on a Mac without using the mouse sometimes.
Dom and David, there will no doubt be a micro-pad with a pixel-sensitive skinny pen (sooner) or a means of using your palm with a sensitive skinny stylus connected to the iPad via a special ring on your finger (later).