Mighty Mouse Rant

The most contacted part of all desktop computers is the mouse, it's the connection between your brain and the machine you are using for your living and an increasing amount of social interaction.



The Mighty Mouse is incredibly flawed. Did Apple not realise the scroll ball would get clogged up when thinking back to the pre-optical mice, or are the designers so young that they don't remember that far back?

The main problem, not covered the deluge of people complaining about the ball getting dirty, is the lack of button chording.

This is where you need to press more than one button at the same time. I, for instance, use CAD programs where you can pick up an object, holding the left button and zoom out using the wheel/ball. This is optional behaviour, but I find that in applications such as SketchUp it proves invaluable as references can be made to objects that are out of view when working in a tight space.

Of course this doesn't work on a mighty mouse!

I bought a retail boxed one as soon as they came out, used it for 30min then sold it to a colleague. I didn't even get to the ball cleaning part.

I tend to get through mice at a fair rate as they are used, I assume, far more than a regular user. I have been through virtually all the fads from the first Microsoft wheel mouse to the Intelimouse 'Explorer' (the first MS optical mouse), Logitech, Dell, IBM, SUN and more recently the very beautiful S+ARCK mouse. At the moment I use a MS 5000 notebook mouse on the move and a Razer Pro (Mac Edition) at my desk.

I really hope Apple fix this problem in the next (Aluminuim?) version of their mouse, but I somehow doubt that will happen.
Form before function seems to be Apple's Achilles heel.

Home Working

After a couple of weeks of working from home it still feels a little strange to get up and come to sit at a desk remote from my colleagues a thousand miles away.

There is a constant feeling of not having done the things on the ever-present to do list, very much like being at University.

Phisical vs Theory

Believe it or not we often don't get to see a lot of the things we design, even whole shops or buildings are often forgotten when they are completed as there is so much other stuff that we are doing.

In this case it's a smaller part of a project that was made by the casting company for us to look at before they went ahead to make the production versions.

I have included a screenshot of the assembly drawing to give an idea of how we intended it.
I must say, it's not always personal taste that dictates the designs that we often come out with.

Brilliant UK plug idea

How often have you needed to take something with a plug in a minimal bag? I carry my laptop a lot and the plug is the only thing that prevents the bag being svelt and minimal. Lets hope this plug makes it through prototyping, financing, approval and distribution.

James Dyson Awards page

Beautiful information

As was said in Pattern Recognition and Idoru, there is an increasing trend to using data in a much more visual way. The informationisbeautiful site goes some way to pushing that idea.