OpenOffice Shows Off New Mouse

OpenOffice.Org (as it’s now known) may not be much closer to its goal of dethroning Microsoft in the world of office suites, but it’s moving in a bold new direction with the introduction of its new mouse.

I can't help myself, I laughed when I first saw it 😦

Now, after you’ve stopped laughing at the picture, you’ll need to pay attention, because it seem the team behind the mouse are actually very serious about it. OpenOffice has teamed up with WarMouse to handle the hardware side of things. The mouse boasts, as you can probably already guess, fully 18 buttons and boasts an Xbox 360 style analog stick where the right thumb rests.

The mouse’s designer, Theodore Beale, is fairly adamant that it’ll be something special when people actually get their hands on it, saying that, “You can do far more with this than most people are likely to realise at first. 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.”

Of course, there’d be no reason for the OpenOffice.Org branding (complete with seagulls) if the mouse didn’t have some OpenOffice functionality, and it does sound quite interesting for anyone who’s been given headaches by Microsoft’s Excel. Again, according to Beale,

“In Writer and Calc, you have your most powerful and complicated macros on one row of buttons and simple functions like bold, undo and format cell on another. 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.”

It’s certainly an interesting device, and it provides an interesting counterpoint to the recently launched, entirely buttonless Apple Magic Mouse… somehow though, we think the Magic Mouse will probably be going a lot further than OpenOffice’s effort.

Tags: buttons, Calc, excel, hardware, microsoft, microsoft office, mouse, ms, office 2007, OOo, OpenOffice, OpenOffice.org, word, Writer