Posts Tagged ‘mouse’
The unreasonable effectiveness of mice
July 28th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
I don’t want to turn this into an input devices blog, but Andy Ihnatko’s post on the Magic Trackpad—which, curiously, didn’t show up in my RSS reader until this morning—got me thinking. I still don’t think the Magic Trackpad is right for me (see this discussion), but he does identify an interesting niche for it. And I started wondering why I feel certain I—and most other people—will be sticking with a mouse.
Here’s the key paragraph in Andy’s post:
AppleTV just got realllllllllly interesting. Existing AppleTVs — the one Apple product you’ve forgotten about, the one that sits at the back of the class and never raises its hand — are MacOS devices. They’re controlled via IR remotes and thus they require line-of-site between the device and the operator. With the Magic Trackpad in the product lineup, Apple could completely reinvent the AppleTV as a device that hides somewhere behind your TV, runs a new flavor of iOS, and ships with a Magic Trackpad instead of a clickybutton remote.
A Magic Trackpad—small(ish), wireless, and with no need for a surface to sit on—would be a great input device for AppleTV. You’d need to have the Tap to Click feature turned on because normal clicking is done by depressing the trackpad’s feet, which wouldn’t work if you’re on the couch or sitting in your recliner.1
I’m skeptical that the next AppleTV will be an iOS device, though. I know this is a popular rumor, but I don’t see it. Apple’s stated roadmap for iOS is to unify it over the 4.x series, eventually getting the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad all running the same version. Making an iOS-powered AppleTV would throw a monkey wrench into that plan, because it would require an onscreen pointer. Current iOS devices don’t need a pointer because your finger is right there touching the screen. When you’re operating a TV, and your finger is on a trackpad on the other side of the room, you need to see something on the screen that mimics the motion of your finger. I don’t believe Apple wants to put a pointer in iOS.
Regardless of the underlying operating system, with the right UI software, a trackpad would be a great TV input device.
So why don’t I think a trackpad will be great computer input device? I can’t quite put my (ahem) finger on it, but I think it has something to do with levels of abstraction.
When the Mac first came out, much was made of the notion that you used the mouse to manipulate items in your computer directly. This wasn’t true, of course, but it did make you feel closer to the machine because your previous computer work had been mediated through a keyboard,2 typing in cryptic commands. The mouse was, in fact, just another type of mediation, an abstraction. You were moving this plastic brick around on your desk to get an arrow to move around on the screen.
Despite the abstraction, there was something very right about the mouse. In a short time, mice were a common sight. Even before Windows was usable,3 people were using mice with character-based DOS shells like Norton Commander. Sometime in the early 90s, it became unthinkable for a desktop personal computer to ship without a mouse.
Other pointer devices have come and gone, but the mouse has stayed around in basically the same form it started with over a quarter of a century ago. Switching from mechanical to optical encoding was a big improvement in reliability, but it didn’t change how you used the mouse. The proliferation of buttons and the addition of a scrollwheel, no matter how successful they may have been, were really just tweaks.
Manufacturers have tried to come up with something better than a mouse. Graphics tablets have had their niche among artists and designers for years, but if they were going to spread to the general user, they would have done so by now. Laptop computers have seen the most experimentation with mouse substitutes, for the obvious reason that it’s really hard to use a mouse on your lap. Everyone seems to have settled on the trackpad as the best laptop pointer device—and it is much better than what came before—but most people still prefer to use a mouse when they can.
If you believe that removing layers of abstraction between the computer and the user makes for a better interface, you would think the trackpad would come out ahead of the mouse. With a trackpad, your finger is moving the onscreen pointer; the motion isn’t being mediated through a plastic brick. Why, then, the continued success of mice? Why isn’t Logitech in the trackpad business?
I think the problem with the trackpad is that it falls into a sort of uncanny valley between the touchscreen and the mouse.
With a well-made touchscreen, the behavior is almost physical. You touch the items and move them around; you pinch and pull to resize. In every case, you see your fingers right on the thing being manipulated, and it seems natural.
With a mouse, your hand is off to the side moving an object around on your desk to change things up on the screen—the whole business is more abstract. But somehow, the unrealistic motion of your hand matches up with the fact that the effect it’s having is a foot or two away. I can’t say that this feels natural, but it does feel right.
The trackpad uses the touchscreen’s natural finger movements, but has them tied to a screen some distance away. It works OK—I’m using a trackpad right now, and it’s just fine—but its mixture of the real and the abstract isn’t quite as good as the mouse’s more fully abstract behavior.
I don’t want to come off as a trackpad hater; I’m not. At the moment, it’s the best pointer device we have for laptops. I just don’t see it replacing the mouse on my desktop.
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Prepositions are funny, aren’t they? If I had written in the couch or on the recliner, you’d have done a double-take. With a chair, you can sit in it or on it—in is more common, but on is common enough—but when that chair turns into a recliner, you have to be in it. ↩
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Yes there were mice before the Mac, but they weren’t in wide use. Joysticks were also used to move onscreen pointers around, but they didn’t have the direct feel of mice. ↩
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That joke is too easy; don’t bother. ↩
Magic, Inc.
July 27th, 2010 at 6:06 pm
I know it’s wrong to judge a product before using it, but I can’t help thinking that Apple’s new Magic Trackpad is a cool accessory that I will be avoiding like the plague.
In the first place, I don’t understand the appeal of a trackpad on a desktop computer. On laptops, they’re certainly they’re an improvement over the old PowerBook scrollball and the ThinkPad clitoris, but they’re not nearly as good—not nearly as tactile—as a well-designed mouse. Whenever I need to do a lot of work on my old iBook, I bring out a mouse and plug it in. It’s just better than a trackpad.1
The rollout of the Magic Trackpad and my painful experience with the Magic Mouse last year lead me to wonder whether Apple will ever again make a pointer device that I can live with. I actually like the Apple (née Mighty) Mouse,2 but I’m afraid its days are numbered as Apple slowly turns its entire product line iPhonesque.3
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Yes, I know the newer trackpads are much more capable than the one on my iBook G4. I’ve tried the new ones; they’re still not as good as a mouse. The Touch interface is great when your fingers are on the screen with the objects you’re manipulating—not so good when they’re two feet away. ↩
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I know most people hate the Apple Mouse because its scrollball attracts debris and is a pain in the ass to clean. There’s no question but that Apple should have made it cleanable. Still, I find it a pleasure to use and, before the Magic Mouse was introduced, had some hope that Apple would fix its problems in a later revision. Now it’s the redheaded stepchild of the Apple lineup and will probably be dropped as the company goes all Touch. ↩
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Despite my tendency to wander off on tangents, I believe this is the very first post in which my footnotes are as long as than the body text. ↩
Goodbye to the Magic Mouse
December 18th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Today I returned to the Apple Store to exchange the Magic Mouse I bought a week ago for a more prosaic Apple (née Mighty) Mouse. Not because I regretted the extra expense of the Magic Mouse, and not because the Magic Mouse is missing the middle click feature. No, it went back because of two faults I can’t live with:
- it scrolls on its own, that is, when I’m not running my finger across its top surface; and
- it hurts my wrist to use it.
The first of these problems is the easiest to explain, if not to understand. I first noticed it while looking through a multipage PDF that I was preparing to use in an online presentation to clients. I was treating each page as a slide and had adjusted the window size to exactly match the page size. The idea behind this setup was that each page down keypress would bring me to the next slide in perfect registration with the window. I would use the mouse with Preview’s annotation tools to highlight certain features on the slides as necessary. What I found was that having my hand on the mouse would sometimes cause the slide to scroll up or down, out of registration with the window. At first I thought I was inadvertently touching the top of the mouse and running my finger along it, but no matter how careful I was, the unwanted scrolling persisted.
Later, I had even more trouble with Google Maps. I’ve always thought that Google’s choice to use the scroll wheel to control the zoom (instead of, say scrolling) was a bad design choice. It’s really miserable when your mouse sends spurious scroll signals. Since downward scrolls seemed to be Magic Mouse’s favorite, I kept finding myself zooming out to view an entire state when I’d just been looking at looking a single block.
Ghost scrolling is, I suppose, something that I might have anticipated happening occasionally. I’ve noticed similar behavior with track pads, and the Magic Mouse’s top surface is basically a track pad. It’s happened far too frequently to be acceptable, but it is at least understandable. My sore wrist, though, is just bizarre.
You have to realize that I have been using computer mice since early 1985, when I bought my first Mac. That’s nearly a quarter-century of mousing without any distress. And in that time I’ve used many different kinds of mice: roller ball, optical, one-button, two-button, three-button. Not one of them caused me any pain until the Magic Mouse.
I started using the Magic Mouse in earnest on Monday morning. (I had played with it a bit over the weekend, just to see how it would work with my old iBook, but it was only a few minutes here and there.) My wrist felt a little funny by the end of the workday Monday, but I wouldn’t call it pain. By Wednesday night, though, it was pretty bothersome, like a stretched muscle. I took my wireless Mighty Mouse (a “travel mouse” that goes with my iBook on business trips) in to work on Thursday morning and have been using it the past two days. The bothersome feeling in my wrist is gone.
So what’s wrong with the Magic Mouse? I decided to use some of the equipment here at work to compare it to my wired and wireless Mighty Mice.
| Mouse | Weight (g) |
|---|---|
| Magic | 105 |
| Mighty wireless | 135 |
| Mighty wired (w/cord) | 91 |
| Mighty wired (cord supported) | 82 |
The Magic Mouse seemed a bit heavy, and it certainly is heavier than the wired Mighty Mouse; due, no doubt, to the batteries. But it’s not as heavy as the wireless Mighty Mouse.
| Mouse | Push resistance (lb) | Friction coefficient |
|---|---|---|
| Magic | 0.05 | 0.22 |
| Mighty wireless | 0.07 | 0.24 |
| Mighty wired | 0.04 | 0.22 |
A mouse’s resistance to being pushed across the pad is probably a better indication of its effect on my wrist than its weight is. I used a calibrated force gauge to push each of the mice across my mouse pad five times. The results in the table above are the median values. The friction coefficient is the push resistance divided by the weight (in consistent units). I should mention that these results are a bit dicey, as the gauge is not intended to be used to measure forces this low.1 Still, the results match my subjective sense: the heavier the mouse, the harder it is to push it. And it would make sense for Apple to have nearly equal friction coefficients across its line of mice.
The upshot of this testing is that the difficulty of moving the mouse around can’t be the reason the Magic Mouse made my wrist hurt. While it’s harder to move than the wired Mighty Mouse, it’s easier to move than the wireless Mighty Mouse.
I went on to test the click resistance. I determined where my index finger sat on the mouse and used the force gauge to measure the push required to click.
| Mouse | Click force (lb) |
|---|---|
| Magic | 0.27 |
| Mighty wireless | 0.21 |
| Mighty wired | 0.21 |
Again, the results shown are the median of five tests for each mouse. Here we do see a difference that could, in part at least, explain my problem. The Magic Mouse takes about 25% more force to click than do the Mighty Mice. This matches, qualitatively, my subjective impression.
The last measurement I made is the height of the mouse at the point where I click it.
| Mouse | Height (in) |
|---|---|
| Magic | 0.63 |
| Mighty wireless | 0.88 |
| Mighty wired | 0.88 |
Here again we see a distinct difference. The Magic Mouse has a low profile—lower, I suspect, than any mouse I’ve used before.
Another difference between the Magic Mouse and the others is one I wasn’t sure how to measure. It seems to takes more finger movement to scroll a small distance on the Magic Mouse than it does on the Mighty Mouse. Scrolling2 on the Magic Mouse doesn’t start until you’ve dragged your finger a bit, presumably to keep you from inadvertently scrolling with every tiny movement of your finger. Some of your scrolling motion, then, is wasted, which doesn’t happen on the Mighty Mice (or other scrollwheel mice). For long scrolls, this wasted motion is more than made up for by the savings you get with momentum scrolling; but I find myself doing a lot more small adjustments than big flings, so the savings are lost on me. (I also find the lack of immediate response a bit annoying.)
So I’m left with three possible reasons for the dull ache in my wrist:
- Higher click force.
- Lower profile.
- More finger movement when scrolling.
I’m not an orthopedist or biomechanical specialist, so I can’t say with any authority which of these three is the more likely cause. But if I had to bet, I’d put my money on the lower profile and the small but noticeable change it forces in the position of my hand and fingers.
Whatever the cause, the solution was to dump the Magic Mouse for older and less attractive technology.
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Yes, I know I shouldn’t report two digits in the friction coefficient when I have only one digit in the resistance. I just didn’t want it to look like the three mice had exactly the same friction coefficient. ↩
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I’m talking here about deliberate scrolling, not the ghost scrolling, which takes no finger movement at all. ↩
Magic Mouse
December 14th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
The scrollball on my Mighty Mouse began acting up again last week, just a month after I’d given it a thorough cleaning. Time for a new mouse, but what kind?
I knew from a short test that I wouldn’t be happy with a Logitech mouse, or any mouse with a scroll wheel that has detents. I used to use mice like that all the time, but now I can’t stand the bump-bump-bump as it turns. Also, I’ve come to appreciate the ability to scroll horizontally as well as vertically, and don’t want to give that up. Which reduces my options considerably.
The least expensive solution was a Microsoft mouse with a tilting scroll wheel that acts sort of like a joystick for sideways scrolling. I decided against it because it seemed a little weird, and I was worried that it wouldn’t really work well with a Mac.
A replacement Mighty Mouse (which is now called simply the Apple Mouse) seemed like a reasonable choice. Yes, cleaning the scrollball is a pain, but I’ve always found it very comfortable and easy to use. I went off to the local Apple Store after work on Friday, expecting to pick one up.
Of course, all the computers on display are outfitted with the new Magic Mouse. I gave it a try, even though I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it. Ten minutes later I walked out of the store with one in my pocket.
(picture grabbed from Apple’s site)
The Magic Mouse is very beguiling, especially its iPhone-like momentum scrolling. But a good initial impression doesn’t mean a good longterm user experience. I can see four downsides to the new mouse:
- The price. $70 is a lot to pay for a mouse. I got over that objection by thinking about how much the mouse is used an how important it is in my use if the computer. It’s like a good keyboard or a monitor: something in constant use that’s worth spending a little extra on.
- The way you have to lift your index finger to do a secondary (right) click. This is a big objection for many people, and I can understand their concerns, but in 2+ years of using the Mighty Mouse, that’s never been a problem for me.
- The lack of a middle click. I use middle click only when browsing, but when browsing I use it a lot, because it’s how I open links in new tabs. This such a ingrained habit with me that it was—and, after a few days of use, still is—my biggest concern about using the Magic Mouse. I’m sure I can get used to Command-clicking, but I’m not sure I want to.1
- The extra finger movement needed to scroll. This is something I didn’t consider until I started using it. Because you scroll by drawing your finger across the top of the mouse, your scrolling finger goes through a greater range of motion than it would with a scrollwheel or ball. The difference is noticeable, although I don’t expect any RSI issues from it.
Update 12/15/09
I should have also mentioned that it aluminum body makes the Magic Mouse is distinctly heavier than other mice and that its click mechanism provides more resistance (probably to avoid inadvertent clicking when you’re trying to scroll), both of which make it a bit more cumbersome. I doubt that either of these characteristics will be dealbreakers, but they do make for a distinctly different feel when switching from another mouse.
Update 12/17/09
OK, I don’t know what I was thinking, but the bit in the previous update about the Magic Mouse being heavier because of the aluminum body is just wrong. It’s heavier than corded mice because of the batteries, of course, but it’s not heavier than a wireless Mighty Mouse—not by feel, anyway; I haven’t weighed them yet.
Over the weekend, I used the Magic Mouse with my G4 iBook before taking it to its permanent home at work this morning. Since the iBook is running Leopard, the momentum scrolling option doesn’t appear in the Mouse preference pane. But this Terminal command, found at Mac OS X Hints, will give you momentum scrolling anyway:
defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.mouse MouseMomentumScroll -bool yes
After running the command, go to the Mouse preference pane and click the Scroll option off and then back on, and momentum scrolling should start working. I found that the scrolling was very jerky on my iBook until I closed the Mouse preference pane. I suspect this had something to do with the G4’s lack of horsepower and the little video that runs in the preference pane.
If you ever want to turn momentum scrolling off in Leopard, repeat the defaults write command with a “no” at the end instead of a “yes.”
The thing about momentum scrolling that will strike an iPhone user as odd is the lack of “bounce” when you scroll into a document boundary. The Magic Mouse’s scroll just comes to a dead stop when in hits an edge.
I’m hoping I get perfectly comfortable with the Magic Mouse, because I see the elimination of the scrollball as a big improvement in reliability, but the new mouse’s position next to my keyboard is provisional. If I can’t stand the lack of a middle click, or if I can’t get used to the extra motion required to scroll, I’ll return it next week for a Mighty Mouse. A week is a fair tryout.
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I know there are some hacks to give the Magic Mouse a middle- click equivalent, but don’t really want to install any hacks. ↩