The OpenOffice Mouse

It supports Windows, Linux, and Macintosh operating systems, will retail for $74.99, and is not a joke. [OpenOfficeMouse]

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Anonymous

I want one! Would fit 1-6, q,e,r,t,f,g,h bindings and more!
tros

Just make the right half of the keyboard mouse already!
Brainspore

Apparently someone was unclear on why the computer mouse was invented in the first place.
Zadaz

Just because it’s a joke doesn’t mean it doesn’t also exist.

I begrudgingly use OpenOffice. Less and less all the time though. Google Docs is less of a pain to use and has most of the features I need for spreadsheets and documents. And if it’s not up to it that’s what I have inDesign and Illustrator for.

Really only use it now when I need to look at something and I don’t have a ‘net connection.

The interface makes me grind my teeth and the amount of resources/time it takes to launch makes me forget why I launched it in the first place.

And for some reason Adobe products get crashy when OO is open. Probably Adobe’s fault but I rely on them for my work, so they’re staying.
Anonymous

I smell class action law suit. LOL. Like in The Jerk! What was that thing Steve Martin invented? The “octograb”? Thanks that got me giggling.

And pressing that “I’m a human” button is surprisingly reaffirming. You should dispense with the puzzle for your members, but still give them the option of being human.
zyodei

I really, really, want to like OpenOffice…but I just can’t. I find myself using Gnumeric and Abiword (which is great, unless you’re using tables) pretty much all of the time.

In my experience, OpenOffice is much slower to use and has a much longer startup time than Office. This absurdly complicated and clunky looking mouse is, unfortunately, an apt metaphor.

Advice for 4.0: Less is more!
- Axx
  
  I’m with zyodei on this one. I have tried very hard to use open office. But frankly, it is unusable. All of the apps run slow as hell and their “Powerpoint” application is so horrible that it took 15 to 30 seconds for each viewgraph to display during a presentation.
  
  Honestly, if this mouse is not a joke — then it’s awfully ironic. If it’s laser eye simply doesn’t function then the circle will be complete.
Mike S

After reading all of the comments about OpenOffice (OO) I want to chime in and say I use OO all the time, I had strange problems with AbiWord, and no way I’m supporting the crazy direction MS Office XML is careening away on, they refuse to make a browser that is standards compliant, and their XML behavior is even worse. They are so arrogant it’s despicable. Meanwhile OO runs just fine for me under both Ubuntu and XP, and the product is constantly being improved.

It’s hard to take the mouse seriously.
Mitch

Looking at the picture makes my wrist hurt.
technogeek

Actually, the original mouse design was largely derived from the old inductive tablet pucks, and some pucks _did_ have more buttons than we’re used to on a mouse. Depending on the application, having that many functions available on the pointing device can sometimes be a Good Thing, avoiding the need to explicitly go back to menus, or deal with application modality, or juggle a keyboard as well.

I’ve got a controller for use with my DAW software which combines a “jog wheel” with a group of programmable buttons and dials. For that application, it’s a lot faster than trying to rely solely on mouse and keyboard.

My complaint with it is not the buttons, but the fact that it’s still a mouse, which is arguably the worst pointing device ever invented. I’ll take (a reasonable-sized) trackball over mouse, and tablet over trackball, any day.
thelibrarian

I notice that this monstrosity was designed by the notorious mysoginistic, homophobic, hyper-Christian blogger and WhirledNutDaily contributor VoxDay. It seems he has as much respect for the continued well-being of your right hand as he does for women.
thelibrarian

Oh, and this has no official connection to OpenOffice.org – the makers just appropriated the name, as far as I can tell.
Daemon

The existance of a webpage doesn’t make it a real product. I’ll believe it should it actually be sold. And then I’ll mock it extensively.
sniquer

This is a joke. The domain should be a sub-set of “openoffice.org” and not from some other domain. And if this other domain was real, the “whois” would point to a real entity and not be private. Plus what is the strange symbol in the upper right of the page? Why are there video game links? Due diligence people.
- Anonymous
  
  Exactly my point. Moreover: Why do I get the feeling that the company “WarMouse” doesn’t even exist? I mean, sure, Google returning only results pointing to the OO.org mouse and warmouse.com being registered by the same company as openofficemouse.com are really weak indicators…
Junior

The website is as well designed as the mouse appears to be.
Anonymous

how about just sticking an optical sensor under your keyboard and just move that around?
- Chuck
  
  >how about just sticking an optical sensor under your keyboard and just move that around?
  
  Is it too soon to put one on the underside of laptops?
Anonymous

isn’t the idea behind open sourcing to allow for free and equal access to ‘stuff’? so why are they making a product to sell?
ST

I assumed it was a clever joke that references Open Office’s own kludgy, button laden interface. That it could possibly by real never occurred to me. In fact, I still don’t really believe it. It simple CANNOT be real. Seriously. No way.
Anonymous

The Blender.org mouse will have twice as many buttons.
jfrancis

I remember when the first Wacom-style pens went wireless. The first thing my boss did was add a chain to ours, like the ballpoints in some banks, so no one would walk off with it.
Viadd

It only has 512k of flash in it. That’s k as in milliMeg.

Why didn’t they just stick a GB of flash in it, preloaded with a Linux live distro including Open Office?

Walk up to any computer, plug in your mouse, reboot from the flash drive and you’ve got a system all set up the way you like it.
- 2k
  
  uh. sound like you might want to pursue that yourself no?
- Junior
  
  That is a really f*cking good idea, actually.
sinisterscrawl

But will it do a Bluetooth sync with my Power Glove?
randwolf

“Actually, the original mouse design was largely derived from the old inductive tablet pucks, and some pucks _did_ have more buttons than we’re used to on a mouse.”

Yes, and (I have been reliably told) were such high RSI risks that they are no longer manufactured.

I suppose this continues the OO tradition of poor usability.
Anonymous

It seems like they do everything in their power to scare off users from what should be a superior program.

With the interface/docs I’ll never be able to get my office to switch. :(
Anonymous

i thought the only reason to use open office is if you’re too poor to afford windows and everyone around you requires things in .doc for some sick reason?
Anonymous

I have a 40-button mouse, the ProHance PowerMouse 100, from around 1990. ProHance Technologies in Sunnyvale, CA also made 3-, 12-, and 17-button mice. You can Google “ProHance PowerMouse 100″ and get over a hundred hits, some with photos, like:
http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue113/p08_reviews6_BUILDING_A_BETTER_MOUSE.php
If you think “ProHance” is so silly a name that no-one else would have used it, just try Googling it by itself…. — Don Simpson
audax_axon

ok, this is just obviously silly. But, I do seriously wonder why so many folks are reflexly adverse to any increase in the number of dedicated, instantly accessible hardware inputs. I use a mouse with 8 programmable buttons and utilize the crap out of all that flexibility. Both in DAW software and web browsing. (side button = space bar , pages in browser, play/stop in DAW, etc.)

I love not having to include my visual cortex into the loop when a simple finger twitch will do. (I consider myself a very visually oriented person BTW, it just seems to be a waste of attention resources to have to hunt through menus or even spatially locate a cursor if it’s not relevant to the task).

In fact I wouldn’t mind having even more inputs, which for me, equate to increased agility in bending teh computarz to my will.

Two of the apparent goals of certain systems which seem to attempt to minimize hardware controls and simultaneously minimize modal interfaces have always been strangley at odds to me in this light.

Can anybody present the alternative perspective? What is good about having fewer input options?
- arikol
  
  How about: because the number of buttons and layout will require you to look at it anyway. Then you will have to strain your fingers (and wrist) to get to the buttons.
  
  An 8 button Logitech is at least logically designed for ergonomics as well as efficiency. You can train your motor control to access all features without a thought.
  This abomination is just kludgy. Like the OpenOffice dot Org application and their website.
  
  They just do not get it.
  
  Design the interface better so that a 18 button mouse is not required. Sadly, the state of OOo is such that 18 buttons probably won’t suffice.
  Even if the mouse is a joke it still highlights the UI issues in OpenOffice. Working on Linux you will feel less frustration using AbiWord or other options. Even MS Office is slightly less irritating. Apple Pages seems like the only wordprocessor I’ve used which has all the features required and still remains usable by staying away from pretty much all the UI design elements which are in the other programs, and were introduced into word processors with Windows 3.0 or the original Mac.
  That’s a long time ago, and even though we acknowledge that not everything old is bad (heck, even command line interfaces with cryptic commands can’t be beat for some work) we can plainly see that a design around the system limitations from 1980-1990 will probably not be the best now that those limitations no longer exist.
Anonymous

I have some other images
octopod

gosh, I thought it was a joke, but no, there’s United States Patent D60249 applied for by the designer. fwiw, the claim is for “The ornamental design for an input device, substantially as shown and described.”. Filing Date was 02/25/2008 went public 10/20/2009.

Sceadugenga

Come on, guys. The program’s name is OpenOffice.org. You know, as if it were the name of a website, which it also is. Get it? I don’t.

Category

If you set that up as a chorded input device, you wouldn’t need a keyboard at all. Hmm… I’m highly tempted to get one, tbh

Anonymous

So what patent do they have – most buttons crammed on a mouse??? #fail

Anonymous

@40: The D at the start of the patent number indicates that this is a design patent, which is different from a patent on an invention. A design patent, as one might infer, only protects a particular design for a device, not its technical implementation. For instance, Microsoft’s USB wireless mouse has a patented design – anyone can make a USB wireless mouse, but only MS can make one in that particular shape.

oligore

It has a analog stick on the far side and the comparison shows it owning apple magic mouse with 18:1 buttons.

Avram / Moderator

Is that both a scroll-wheel on the front and a trackball on the side (facing away from us, but you can sort of see a little bump)?

Anonymous

The world’s first QWERTY mouse.

Anonymous

What an anti-usability product!

How can OpenOffice allow the use of it’s trademark for this?

rationalist

Sigh. There’s one born every minute. I just wish they didn’t all end up working for and commenting on BoingBoing.

Really, people. November Fools.

Rob Beschizza

If there’s one thing worse than not enjoying a joke, it’s being unable to appreciate why others do.

jackruby1123

uhhhh…what?

Anonymous

instant carpal tunnel

Xeni Jardin

Yup. About as klunky and ugly as Open Office the app.

(said the person who uses ONLY Open Office, all the time, but hates it only 50% as much as I hate Word and whatever Apple’s product is).

Anonymous

Maybe try NeoOffice? I sort of assume you have, but you didn’t mention it, so maybe not. I tried Open Office for a little while. I think I went back for reasons that only apply to me, though (like I couldn’t get the envelopes to print rightside up or something).

Anonymous

How the eff does that work?

A Nonny Moose

With all those buttons, I’ll bet it’s good for MMORPGs, too.

Anonymous

Stop complaining – this mouse is a perfect match for the 17 fingers on my right hand!

arikol

Oh, yeah, and if I hate my carpal tunnels I would rather destroy them with something pretty like the Magic Mouse.

Seriously. Anyone, ANYONE, can add more buttons onto a device and proclaim that it has added functionality and is more powerful.
It’s much harder to actually make a usable device and integrate it perfectly with the applications it should support.
OpenOffice have shown it time and again that their focus is on the number of feature included so they match MS Word. The interface gets roughly copied from older versions of MS Office seemingly without even an understanding of WHY the MS Office designers made that choice.
I may not really like the usability issues in MS Office, but at least most of their ideas make sense (or made sense at the time they were implemented).
OpenOffice only copies, no innovation, not even fixes for the more obvious anachronisms in the interface. And it’s slow on all systems I’ve used it on. I tried to love OO because I really like the OSS ideal, but like GIMP I just couldn’t bring myself to really love it partly because of the faults, but more importantly because of the developers complete disregard for these issues. There is still a engineering type elitism in the communications from the dev teams on those projects. A sort of attitude that proclaims that they think it’s good enough, and if users can’t see that it’s good enough the problem must be the users, not the program. And the truth is for both programs that the interfaces need a complete redesign.

This mouse is just a good reminder of those problems.

ranomatic

Not a joke? Really? This has to be someone’s idea of a jolly joke. I looked at it and laughed and laughed.

Anonymous

I still can’t believe this is not a joke.

However, this looks fairly ergonomic and much more comfortable to use than Apple’s magic mouse. Too many buttons, definitely. But you could turn most of them off and stick to maybe 5 that you need.

That analog stick is not a bad idea, really. I would use that for tons of things.