Solutions to problems
Apple have done it again. Not content with reinventing the computer, music players, mobile phones and the 12″, they have gone and reinvented the humble mouse. That’s right, the device they made popular in the first place (with one button).
Long after conceeding ground to Microsoft and their “two buttons HAS to be better than one” thinking, Apple have come with something ingenious. No, not THREE buttons – NONE. That’s right. Seems like buttons are a thing of the past as anyone using one of their slick new keyboards might tell you. Clive Sinclair eat your heart out.
Fairly soon, Apple will be responsible for a gesture based keyboard, then that will evolve into a lazy wave of the hand to indicate, y’know, just go away and do my work for me willya.
The video looks slick. Very slick. Why go to all that trouble of rolling a finger on a moving wheel when you can just slide your finger down a glossy piece of plastic?
It does, in all fairness, perform really well as a mouse and does away with all the miniscule side buttons that seem to be following Microsoft’s philosophy. And of course, it looks great. like an iPhone fell face down in a bath of milk.
But what’s really clever about the “magic mouse” is that Apple have created the solution to a problem nobody knew existed.
What horrific button based incident happened to a young Steve Jobs that has caused this hate campaign against the humble button?
I absolutely love touch screens and gesture recognition interfaces, but I do feel that some tasks require the physical feedback of a traditional control mechanism.
I fear for a future as painful as trying to use the virtual analogue stick on Mario 64 DS.