One of the points our ergonomic consultant made was to prefer keyboard to mouse use. Apparently, our hands and wrists are worse off with gliding motions than with stationary typing, and in most setups the device sits on a flat surface we have to reach for. The combination makes for quick carpal tunnel; laptop trackpads aren’t much better from their cramped positions, and they’re a pain to use.
Then there’s the obvious advantage of efficiency with keyboard shortcuts – they’re faster to input, and they keep your hands in the same position for additional typing. Mousing requires precious seconds of hand-eye coordination to hunt down the right pixels to click, and commits the entire hand to its usage. No wonder high-end mice are evolving to include more and more buttons to access common functions with simple tactile buttons.
That said, I don’t think we can be rid of the mouse, as pretty much all modern interfaces require a cursor just due to complexity and contextual access to functions (e.g., you want your “print” button to be close to the document you’re viewing). The question then becomes how to move between keyboarding and mousing without shifting hands back-and-forth and killing input momentum. Even on keyboards with embedded mousing pads and trackpads, the hands are forced to relocate between the two modes.
Then there’s that idea of making the keyboard into a giant mouse – or, at least, half of one. It looks ridiculous enough to pass itself off as a bad April Fool’s joke.
On the car ride home, though, an idea struck me. We have display screens on keys with the Optimus Maximus, and we have full touch screens with the iPhone: can we combine the two to have touch-sensitive keys on the keyboard which act as a mousing surface? You’d move your hands over the top of the keys to move the cursor and, say, press a key to click on an item. A special key on the left would activate this “mouse mode” when held down, so the right hand is free to move around and click.
Of course, this requires the keys to be laptop-style and flat, but my Apple wireless keyboard rocks the design perfectly fine, and actually forms a smooth surface on top of the keys with little grooves in between. It’d probably cost hundreds to manufacture, and wouldn’t work for gaming or pixel-precise CG art. I haven’t worked out how right-clicking and scroll wheels would fit in either.
But what you do get is a tactile keyboard (unlike, say, the iPhone’s onscreen keyboard) with mousing capabilities while letting your hands stay in the same position. You’d still have to make a mental shift from typing to mousing, but you’re not making the physical shift in grasping for a mouse slightly out of reach. You could also work entirely with your mouseboard™ entirely on your lap, with your hands at their natural positions.
And it’d bring the term “touch typing” to a whole new literal level.