With tablets and trackpad-based laptops slowly taking over the world, using an actually old-fashioned mouse seems to be becoming a niche passion for an increasingly small but devoted few. Maybe the mouse should just die already, but I can't be only one who just can't give it up.
If you're buying a new computer and it comes with a mouse you're probably looking at a shitty machine bundled with a relic. The age of the mouse is over. Anyone pushing them with new computers is selling crap.
I'm so tired of mice. I've gotten used to touchscreens, and trackpads, and now whenever I have to use a simple pointer, I feel like I've traveled back in time. I almost expect all my icons to go 8-bit. And for years now, they've just been awful. When was the last time you really loved a mouse? When was the last time you were like, "damn, this is a great mouse and I enjoy using it?" Odds are, if you have had that experience in the last five years, it's been with a mouse that does a lot more than simple mousing. It probably had a touchpad on its top, or a gyroscope inside of it, or other way to manipulate data in a non-linear, two-dimensional fashion. In other words, it was probably much more than a mouse.
We're getting trained by our phones and our tablets do do more and more with our hands. Some of those mobile gestures are making their way to the desktop—think of the way you can pinch to zoom on a trackpad now. And as we become more and more accustomed gestures, mice, and the single-point, two-dimensional actions they demand, make less and less sense. They feel constraining. Limiting. And that's because they're outdated.
If the mouse were an automobile, it would qualify for collecter car plates. Douglas Englebart created a mouse prototype in 1963, and then showed it off to the world in 1968 at the now-famous Mother of all Demos. The Macintosh took it mainstream in 1984, and for nearly 30 years now it's been giving us all a way to move a curser around the screen and select. And little more.
Today at any given time we may be running 20 apps at once, with a dozen or more browser windows open, while trying to sort through more data in a few seconds than an early Cray supercomputer saw over the course of its lifetime. And yet we still use tools designed for a simpler time, with simpler needs.
And the thing is, the thing we've all been waiting for, the thing that's going to make us work faster, and more efficiently and be less prone to repetitive stress injuries and wrist strain and just plain old frustration—that thing is already here. It's gesture-based computing, and your operating system already supports it.
Gesture-based computing gives us far more precision and control over the interface. We can manipulate not just points but entire screens. We can perform complex actions that once required keyboard shortcuts, with just our fingertips. Combining one movement with another lets us do things that the mouse's limited range of motion could not—at least not without throwing a staggering numbers of buttons into the mix.
Apple, as usual, is ahead of the curve on this. The touchpads in its laptops, combined with the gestures built into Lion and Mountain Lion let us perform all sorts of tasks with a few simple swipes. The Magic Trackpad is taking this action to the desktop. And the lone mouse that it does sell, the Magic Mouse, is essentially a multi-touch device that also does mouse things.
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