When did OpenOffice become a shorthand for 'bad usability'?
I mean they're basically just cloning Microsoft Office (There's a joke there but I'll avoid it). I can think of a bunch of problems with OpenOffice but I've never felt they had a particular problem with usability, not compared with Microsoft Office nor with your average Windows or Linux app.
Don't get me wrong there is always room for improvement and they used to do some crazy stuff years back (like have their own desktop) but I'm fairly certain that's in the past.
The problem is that they're "basically just cloning microsoft office". No good usability work comes from basically cloning.
Taking ideas / inspiration from Microsoft Office is great, it's a successful product. But basically cloning just means it works sort of like office, but different enough to be annoying, with no attention paid to designing the overall user experience. It's the same reason Gimp is such a nightmare for Photoshop users.
Gimp isn't a nightmare for Photoshop users just because of usability. It's a nightmare for Photoshop users because most of the features we rely on (say, layer grouping and layer blending effects) are flat out missing.
I think this is actually going to be popular amongst electronic musicians who perform live. Two-dimensional analog position data that you can map to effects sliders and such, plus the joystick, plus all the mod buttons? Not too shabby. Might let yo do things with one hand that'd be complex at best to do with two hands on a mixer.
unless it was photographed in outer space or hard vacuum, judging by the shadows alone, it is a 3d rendering (not to mention speculars, pinhole etc etc..
This will be really great for designers who do a lot of formating and dragging things around the screen with little typing. You could set borders, padding, alignment, columns all sorts of things to make documents look really nice.
OpenOffice is getting ridiculous. All we want is a super-fast client with capabilities on-par with office 2003. YComb should fund some company to do this; load times are getting way out of hand, especially on the mac.
I am surprised it is missing a horizontal scroll wheel- although it could be programmed to use the vertical wheel in combination with another button. Does Apple have some kind of patent coverage on the little trackball scroller? I use that for horizontal scrolling in spreadsheets quite frequently.
I generally find buttons and other physical controls much more usable than touch style interfaces and would be willing to give this device a try to see how it compares with the Space Pilot. http://www.3dconnexion.com/spp/index.php
I do a lot of video editing, but I'm also a programmer. It turns out to be great for both and for anything else.
My point is that it's a great way to get more buttons if you feel like you need them. You can map the buttons to do whatever you want depending on the application, so it's useful in other contexts as well.
It's a good companion to a mouse because it uses your other hand. You aren't going to be typing with one hand when using the mouse, so it's great to have a bunch of single buttons available for common tasks.
It could be a photo but the keypad is fake. The image shows too much smooth colour distribution to be an unmodified photo.
No sane product designer would propose a keypad execution like this anyway. There is a massive ergonomic difference between thumb typing and pressing with the tips of extended fingers - put your fingertips on the keypad of your phone with your hand stretched out to see what I mean.
Sorry, up-voted you by accident. The link you posted came after the "if you doubt the conference is true" comment, it is just proof that there was an OOoCon conference, which frankly I find hard to believe myself.
The many-button mouse is appealing as way of reducing movements between mouse and keyboard.
But it's even better to just stay on the keyboard and skip the mouse altogether. Mice have to be the number one source of computer-based tendon injury. Fortunately, the standard laptop is relatively "ergonomics".
I'd actually be interested to have the area where my wrists make contact with the keyboard be responsive like a large version of the old Thinkpad "TrackPoint" cursor dot thingy.
The standard laptop is hardly ergonomic. The trackpad and pointing devices are somewhat helpful but the keyboards are all (without exception) terrible for extended typing. You're much better off getting a separate keyboard with the left and right halves of the keyboard angled inward so that hands and arms can remain in alignment.
But in general, I don't see anything keeping a person from holding their hands in alignment over a standard keyboard and typing. Any keyboard does involve small finger movement to hit the different keys, so a can't see how changing key layout changes anything.
Each person has a somewhat different pattern of habitual tension that can interfere with even normally easy activities, so there are many adjustments work well for some but not for others. Mice are a different story in that they require arm movements for simple input, an inherently inefficient setup.
What keeps you from holding your hands in alignment is your torso. It's physically impossible to have your hands square to the keys and yet keep the natural and relaxed line from your elbow to fingertips. The only way to do it would be to squeeze your elbows together in front of your body or compensate with your fingers (curling in your little fingers and stretching out your index fingers), neither option would be comfortable or practical.
What requires that your hands be "square to the keys"? I'm typing now and my fingers are a angle relative to the orientation of the square keys, yet that doesn't stand in the way of my typing. Yes, my smaller fingers are curled slightly more than my index and middle finger but that's not a huge insult to my physiognomy. The human body is actually pretty flexible but moreover, since our fingers are different lengths, it's hard to say there is a "perfect" place on the keyboard for them. Of course, for true alignment, one would want to have one's hand's palm upward but that's not going to happen with current input devices so compromises of one sort or another are necessary.
Before the film Office Space, there was no red version of the swingline stapler. After the film, they were inundated with requests for a red version of their stapler.
