New Mouse from OpenOffice Packs 18 Buttons and a Joystick

Posted 11/09/2009 at 4:51am | by Paul Lilly

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A company called WarMouse has joined forces with OpenOffice to develop a rodent that will come in handy for anyone who hates memorizing keyboard shortcuts. You'll just have to remember what each button does instead, and there are a lot of them. Eighteen to be exact, each one programmable, and each one able to function in three different button modes: Key, Keypress, and Macro.

"You can do far more with this [device] than most people are likely to realize at first," explained mouse designer Theodore Beale. "You can launch applications from the desktop, and in your browser you can fire up a specific Internet site with one button, then close it with a double-click on the same button."

In addition to 18 buttons and support for 52 key commands, the OpenOfficeMouse (OOMouse) comes with an analog Xbox 360-style joystick with optional 4, 8, and 16-key command modes, a clickable scroll wheel, 512K of onboard flash memory, 63 on-mouse application profiles, support for 1024-character macros, and other tricks.

And yes folks, the designers also had gaming in mind when developing the OOMouse.

"In games like World of Warcraft -- even without taking the joystick into account -- you've got 16 commands within one click, 40 within two, and all 72 icons on the six action pages within just two double-clicks or less," Beale added.

Image Credit: WarDrive/OpenOffice via TGDaily