I have always been a fan of alternate input devices. The keyboard/mouse combination has always, frankly, offended me. As someone who has been creating graphics on a computer since the days when I had to code the graphics program myself in BASIC, I have always been irritated by the notion that I should adapt how I work, to what is best for some company’s bottom line. The whole concept of QWERTY offends me, the actual design of the hardware offends me, and the mouse has to be the most illconcieved pointing device ever designed. If you were actually setting out to create the least efficient interface possible, you would have a hard time doing better than the QWERTY keyboard and mouse. Back in the early days of the mouse, I was one of those people who used a trackball. Eventually, I had enough money that I could buy a digitizer tablet, and was in heaven. When I moved into 3D graphics, I started building dial boxes and as soon as it came out, the Spaceball shot to the top of my “must have” list. If you look at me desk today, it is cluttered with all sorts of input devices, including a Space Explorer 3D mouse (essentially the newest version of the Spaceball), a Wacom tablet, and a little game keypad that lets me map any keys I want over to it to just have a grouping of the buttons I want. If I could afford it, I would love to have something like the JazzMutant Lemur, and I still need to buy a USB mixing board to get a few sliders and knobs. I find it lets me sit down and work with the least amount of thought, and hop from app to app, without having to constantly reconfigure in my head which hotkeys do what on the keyboard. To me, the purpose of an input device is to make my life easier, not require me to do more work.
The strange thing though is what happens when anyone else sits down at my computer. It is an immediate, and noticeable panic. People who have been using a mouse and keyboard are suddenly paralyzed, not being able to figure out how to do anything. If they figure out to pick up the tablet stylus, they are then immediately thwarted by the fact that they can’t just move it successively across the same area like they would a mouse on a mousepad to get the cursor across the screen. Now I already know that the die-hard mouse users out there are saying
No, how tablets work is weird, and just because you are used to it, doesn’t mean you should expect normal people to understand it!
– Someone ruined by a lifetime of using a mouse.
However, this is where it all gets turned on its head. Actually, how the tablet works is not in any way weird. Multiple studies have shown that children who have no computer experience learn more than twice as fast on a tablet as opposed to a mouse. Tablet users are on average 20% more efficient than people doing the same task on a mouse as well. It is the mouse that is weird, you just were so beaten down by it, that you have submitted, and now accept its totally nonsensical relative movement as normal. A tablet could not be more simple. You want the cursor in the upper right corner of the screen, you put the stylus in the upper right corner of the tablet. If you want the cursor in the lower left corner of the screen, then you put the stylus in the lower left corner of the tablet. There is nothing to learn. It is just like a touchscreen. you just point the little stick where you want the cursor to go. It is only coming from the twisted logic of the mouse that something as simple as pointing where you want the cursor to go could seem unusual. The same is also true of six-axis devices like the Spaceball. Push it forward, and go forward, twist is clockwise around an axis, and rotate clockwise around that axis. It couldn’t be more simple and direct, so why is it so confusing for the average user?
This is where the lowest common denominator comes in. You see, tablets and six-axis pointing devices, both of which have been around a lot longer than you probably think they have, are expensive items. The technology to create them has gotten better over the years, and they are cheaper to make now than they have ever been, but they have always been significantly more expensive to manufacture than that crappy little mouse they bundle with the system. As a result, the computer manufacturers bet that they could get away with including just a piece of junk mouse, instead of a real pointing device, and your cheap ass would learn to make do with the mouse, instead of spending the extra money on an input device that made sense. They were, of course, right. They were not only right, but they were so right that they trained everyone to adapt to the awful little cheap alternative, to the point that they now shun superior options, preferring to spend money on a premium mouse, loaded with features to try an compensate for the inherent failing of the design. Why do you need on-the-fly resolution scaling from your $100 optical mouse? Because the basic design of the mouse is so poorly thought out that the only way you can move across today’s high-resolution screens, and still have any usable accuracy for fine detail work, requires switching the resolution of your mouse on the fly. Turn the resolution down too much, and it takes several swipes of the mouse just to get from one side of the screen to the other. Turn the resolution up too high, and you can’t select anything, because the mouse is too twitchy. So, you need multiple resolution settings, or you just accept the fact that you are going to have to live with a repetitive stress injury from all that swiping. All to save a couple hundred dollars.
But of course, that isn’t how people see it. They don’t see it as slowing themselves down and damaging their body to save a couple hundred dollars, they see it a not needing that fancy tablet, or that over-the-top 3D input device, because a mouse works just fine. That is how they have been trained to think. They were trained to use a mouse in school, because the school didn’t want to pay for a decent input device. They were required to use a mouse at their job, because their job didn’t want to pay for a decent input device. They were told that is what they should do by their friends, because their friends have been subjected to the same training. Every step of the way, their decisions are shaped, not by what it the most efficient, or the easiest to use, or the most accurate, or the most ergonomically sound, but by what is the most cost effective for the equipment manufacturers. Many of them, even if given a tablet, will continue using a mouse beside the tablet, because they have been so trained, that they just can’t let go of the mouse. Thus we end up with an entire computing culture working inefficiently, and perhaps even in a physically harmful manner, because it is the cheapest way to work. Hundreds of millions of people making their work harder for themselves, slowing themselves down, and possibly even giving themselves permanent injuries, because it saves some money on the purchase price of a system. It often makes me wounder what the world would be like if windows came as a standard feature of housing, but doors were an expensive optional extra. Would people just make do with climbing out the window every day, or would they just knock a hole in the wall? It would seem that most of them would never think of going out and buying a door though, because they were already used to just having windows.
If that is where it ended, then I would just be willing to write it off to people being stupid and cheap, and say that if they want to slow themselves down, lower the quality of their work, and hurt themselves to save a little money, then that is theit choice. But it doesn’t end there. The infuriating thing about the prevalence of the mouse, is that the very same companies that crammed the mouse down our gullet to save some money on manufacturing costs, then use the fact that it is the lowest common denominator as an excuse to not fully support better pointing devices in their software. Sure, once in a while if an alternate input device gets as popular as the Wacom tablets, it will start getting some support from the software companies, but more often than not it is up to the manufacturer of the device to come create special middleware that will allow the device to interface with a given piece of software. The problem with this, of course, is that the middleware often is not only software, but also version specific. That means if a company like Adobe changes anything in their next version of the software, you have to wait for new middleware to come out before your input device functions again, or write your own driver for it. Can you imagine if you had to wait for a new Photoshop driver to come out before your monitor would work? Or how about the old days, where you had to get special application-specific drivers to let your software take advantage of your 3D accelerator card? Yes, I know the counterargument, which is that you can’t expect Adobe to support every input device in the world. Well why can’t you? They seem to do fairly well keeping up with every camera RAW format in the world. The other big graphics company, Autodesk, seems to do pretty well keeping up with new input devices, and the tiny company they bought, Alias, could talk to any USB input device. No, the real reason isn’t about anything but the same old lowest common denominator. Most software companies figure that enough people have been trained to use a mouse, that there is no need to even take any other device into consideration.
Of course this sets up a self-reinforcing cycle. The input device is only useful if the software supports it, and people won’t buy it unless it is useful, so if people aren’t buying it, why support it? Back to the lowest common denominator. I hope that the relative success of Wacom will start opening the eyes of both users and software companies to the benefits of alternate input devices, and support will grow. Unfortunately, I feer that as long as you get a mouse for free with the system, you are going to see the vast majority of people shunning anything that doesn’t look like a mouse, smell like a mouse, and act like a mouse, which is a real shame. As Harmonix showed with Guitar Hero, and as Nintendo has shown with the Wii, alternate input devices not only have appeal to the general consumer, but can be a big selling point, provided you can show them the clear benefit of the device. Yes, that is the game market, but what is gaming but a subset of the overall computing market. As we see companies rush to market with Wii-like presentation devices for PowerPoint, and Guitar Hero-like controllers for desktop guitar training software, I can only hope that general software developers and users might take a little time to reconsider their view of the mouse as the ultimate input device for any sort of application.