Giving the finger to the mouse
OK, Steve just killed Flash, but did you see the really big news buried in the six-pointed death knell?
- Is the magic gone? The multi-touch magic mouse may be the last rodent on my desk.
In his fifth point about touch/mouse/hover (our lament since iPhone came out), Steve notes that Flash was “designed for PCs using mice and that Flash content would need to be rewritten for touch.” In his conclusion, he puts a finer point on it saying, “Flash was created during the PC era — for PCs and mice.” This is some seriously intentional past-tense, and is meant to be read, “This is the era of mobile and touch.”
Steve and Apple have been notorious for picking up technologies before their competition and then dropping them just as fast. They had floppy drives, double floppy drives, and then, with the iMac, they dropped floppies completely, together with legacy ports like SCSI and serial. People actually got upset! But now who can say what they would do with a 1.4mb storage device?
Well, the mouse—the peripheral that started it all—is going to go the way of the floppy disc, too. Apple grabbed the mouse by the tail from Xerox and ushered in the PC revolution 30 years ago. They’ve even stood by their mice, stubbornly holding to simplicity and beauty where most made mice into eight-headed, mangled desk-vermin.
The death of the mouse makes perfect sense. It is an abstraction, a thick layer of separation between user and object. The only thing it has on touch is accuracy (down to the pixel). One might say hover is a benefit, but I’d argue that hover is a technical hurdle for touch, though ultimately a natural extension. With multi-touch, the possibilities explode. Nobs can be turned (the mouse was never good at curves). Drawing can be done on the screen (holy meat-brush-stylus, Batman). Awkward key commands can be dropped for gestures. The physical nature of touch will also improve the GUI metaphor, extending the usable space to infinity rather than being confined to the pixel dimensions of the screen (the screen will be a portal to dragging and pulling content, not a container for it).
I expect that I just set up my last desktop computer to arrive with a mouse and a touch-less screen.
Let’s remember and celebrate the mouse (and its virtual avatar, the cursor) for all that it’s done—the zillions of pixelated arrows in print ads, the cute anthropomorphic illustrations, the internet—and forgive it the carpal tunnel syndrome.
Update 2010 07 27: Apple has rung the bell again for the mouse, launching the Magic Trackpad, a large wireless touch pad that brings the laptop’s trackpad to the PC.
Update 2011 08 08: Almost a year since the Magic Trackpad release, Phill Schiller in the WWDC keynote spoke about killing scroll bars because they’re for mice (how useless!) and later said you can ‘tap’ on a button. They’re building in more and more multi-touch. The mouse is being actively displaced.
This makes me really sad. Not because I think the mouse is the perfect way to interact with stuff on the computer, but because the mouse is such a huge part of my childhood. I spent so much of middle school learning how to draw anime characters with a mouse to impress my friends, and now when I tell my kids about that one day, they’ll have no idea what I am talking about, and they won’t appreciate how special a skill it actually was.
I use my Thinkpad laptop quite a lot, so a llriabee wireless mouse that’s both low-maintenance and comfortable is very important to me. I have used an older model of Logitech wireless notebook mouse before and frankly I was not too impressed. Compared the said older model with my Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 4000, which has been my mouse of choice for almost a year now, the older Logitech model came up short on a few design considerations. First, the general feel of key presses: Microsoft mouse buttons are very responsive and be clearly depressed with a comfortable amount of pressure; the older Logitech on the other hand felt ambiguous at times user doesn’t know for sure if a button has been depressed. Secondly, the USB RF connector on the Logitech is always loose when reattached to the mouse when not in use, resulting in pre-mature power-drain. Luckily, LogitechV220 has been re-vamped to address just these issues. Now I use my trustworthy Microsoft 4000 and the Logitech V220 almost interchably and not even noticing the difference a lot of the times. And I believe that’s a good thing, a well-built mouse should be unobtrusive and becomes almost a natural extension of the computing environment something that’s so natural users don’t even realize its presence. In this regard, Logitech V220 has done a tremendous job to up their previous effort.