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Some people keep clamoring for Apple to switch to a multi-button mouse, but I say leave things the way they are.
Hands on Throttle and Mouse: The Dogfight Over the Mouse Button
by Del Miller
July 23, 2003
Fighter pilots used to have it so easy. Aside from that annoying, eat-flaming-death-scenario, the old fighter planes were at least user friendly. The old piston-engined, propellor-driven fighters of the last century were paragons of simple operation. The entire user interface consisted of a handful of gauges, dials and switches, two rudder pedals plus a throttle and a stick. The stick was fiendishly simple; push forward to go down, pull back to point upward and bend it left or right to bank accordingly. Push on the throttle to go faster and pull to slow down. That's pretty much the user interface short course.
While the stick and throttle setup neatly matched the typical pilot's number of hands, the actual purpose of flying was to shoot down other airplanes and for that you also had to pull a trigger. It was discovered early on, however, that reaching for the machine gun meant not actually driving the airplane, to the detriment of everyone other than the intended target.
The obvious solution was to simply move the trigger onto the stick, allowing the pilot to both fire the gun and fly the plane without juggling throttle, stick and trigger between two hands. If shooting people out of the sky is your kinda deal, you would likely be pleased.
But along came the jet age and the situation suddenly became more complicated. The pilot wasn't just asked to fly the airplane and shoot things anymore: Now he was also a radar operator and a systems engineer, who administered a huge variety of increasingly complicated weapons, all the while zipping around the sky at a dozen miles a minute. There were now way too many buttons, knobs and switches for a two-armed pilot to operate without flat-spinning his way to oblivion.
The solution, by extension, was to put essentially all the controls onto the stick and throttle. The control levers of the modern jet fighter are festooned with such an assortment of flickable doodads that they look like big Tootsie-Rolls covered with M&Ms. Now a thoroughly trained pilot could fire his guns, drop his bombs and all those other job description items, all without moving his hands from the controls.
Now the only thing that the aerospace industry does better than build airplanes is to construct acronyms, and so they called this user interface HOTAS, for Hands On Throttle And Stick.
Driving Technology
In the early 1980s, automotive engineers were facing the same problem that the aircraft industry had seen years earlier. Cars were becoming systems platforms themselves and the simple dashboards of the Studebaker era were rapidly evolving into bewilderingly elaborate control panels befitting the bridge of the starship Enterprise.
In a burst of something very much, but not quite, like logic; automobile designers decided that a user interface good enough for a fighter pilot - a highly-trained, mentally honed, exquisitely motivated warrior, locked in supersonic, three-dimensional, beyond visual range, fight to the death, air-combat - ought to be just the sort of user interface for Grandma's cross-town mosey to the bingo parlor.
So the car makers glommed onto a marvelously perverse interpretation of HOTAS as a way of uncluttering the dashboard. An unholy competition ensued, to pack as many unrelated control devices as information theory allowed onto a single steering column lever.
Crammed into a massively complicated, thumb-sized, Rubic's Cube-like thingy made of ratchety rings and push buttons, one found the control devices for the infinite speeds of the windshield wiper - including Mist, Intermittent and Dual Mode Washer Jet; Cruise control with the totally ambiguous Set, Reset, Cruise and Resume functions, encoded in twists and detents beyond fathoming; Turn signals and headlight dimmer controls and Flasher; and even the capability to run the onboard computer that supplies handy information such as Range, Consumption, Trip, Time, Date and, of course, Expected Time of Arrival.
All of these controls are matte black, labeled in tiny, inscrutable and nearly invisible graphic symbols and hidden squarely behind the steering wheel rim - in the dark.The thrown-together layout defies motor memory: Go three weeks without driving the car and you will forget which device controls what and you will be misting, resuming and flashing at random for days.
And the really sad part is that the inspiration for this mess was HOTAS, the first two letters of which stand for "Hands On." The car guys completely forgot that you normally drive with your hands on the steering wheel and not, as it turns out, on the windshield washer lever.
Studies were performed...
The automobile makers were nonetheless stunned to receive negative customer feedback for their fancy-shmancy, aerospace derived user interface. The surveys indicated that the stalk-mounted, Christmas tree approach was not only unwanted, but actively detested by a large portion of the public. What drivers really wanted were single function knobs on the dash, laid out in plain sight.
Subsequent time-motion studies showed that the multi-function flexibility that was such a boon to fighter pilots was an unnecessary and counterproductive complication for everyday people driving their cars. In response, the car companies promptly buried the surveys and reports and changed nothing. Nowadays we've become so accustomed to the ungainly convention of twitchy steering column controls that we hardly notice the inconvenience.
Cursors: Foiled Again
At about the time that the car companies were attempting the alchemy of turning suburban moms into fighter pilots, Apple Computer was studying a new computer interface that used a mouse. A critical design issue was how many buttons should be included and Apple's studies clearly indicated that fewer was generally better. So Apple pioneered the one-button mouse approach that it uses to this day.
Other folks saw things differently. The Unix workstation people, no doubt seeing themselves as the fighter pilots of the computing world, chose a more complicated setup that used three buttons while Microsoft split the difference with a two-button standard. In the years that followed, aftermarket manufacturers introduced mice with more buttons than humans have fingers, and equipped them with scroll wheels, built in trackballs and other clever little devices, making them at least as complicated as a fighter pilot's stick.
Each of these models has it's proponents and for different applications the argument could be made that one approach has advantages over the others. This is as it probably should be.
But reasonable people may disagree and unreasonable people simply must. Consequently the number of buttons on your computer mouse has, like most computer preferences, become an issue marked with a fervor of religious proportion. Clearly, only a fool would step into such a heated argument. Make way, please, I'm coming through...
Which is best?
If you are operating software that was designed for a two or three button mouse, it is very likely that is what you ought to use. If you are using your computer to play a fighter combat simulator then having a mouse tricked out like the control stick of an F-15 makes perfect sense. If you simply have a preference for multi-button control then by all means you ought to do so.
Multi-button mice are quite often required for very high end software and for the most demanding computer games. Hence there is a temptation to assume that if the most sophisticated applications are best served with multi-button mice then they must be better than the single button species. More is, of course, better.
But this is the same trap that the automobile industry fell into. Just because highly trained CAD/CAM professionals can make use of the extra control, doesn't mean that, say, professional journalists or the average Joe browsing the web is any better off with the extra buttons. And just because many of the high end programs require multi-button mice doesn't mean that one-button mice are simply crutches for beginners and idiots. Not at all.
For a long time I used a two-button, scrollwheel equipped mouse at work and a single-button mouse at home. For the applications I used I could find no overwhelming benefit with either one. Spreadsheets, text processing and databases didn't benefit greatly one way or the other and I had no trouble moving back and forth between home and office.
Ode to the One Button Mouse
What I did find, was that for many applications there are certain advantages to a single button mouse; particularly those applications which are typing intensive with only intermittent and occasional cursor moves.
Take word processing, for instance: Ninety-nine percent of the time my hands are on the keyboard and the mouse comes into play only rarely, say, to make a selection or resize a window. With my no-button, Apple Pro Mouse I can slap my hand over the mouse and make my moves without first manipulating the thing in my grip so that my fingers align with the buttons. Most of the time I don't even grab it like one does a multi-button mouse, I simply lay a couple of fingers haphazardly across the top, drag it around and click with a finger tip or a thumb or the palm of my hand - whichever is most convenient for the position my hand happened to land. Then I'm back to to the keyboard. Does the time I save each day by not having to fondle my mouse every time I need to locate the buttons and fit the appropriate finger to them amount to significant time savings? Am I a more efficient writer because of it?
I couldn't possibly say - I just know that I like it better. I find that the no-button mouse is a simpler, more comfortable, more convenient tool for word processing and that extra buttons would not, and do not, help me a bit.
It's pretty much the same thing with Mozilla here. When I'm web browsing I'm usually sitting back in my chair with a finger or two draped casually somewhere over the mouse, or perhaps with my hand resting on the desk, just touching the thing. Without changing my grip to align finger and button, I can slide that puppy around wherever I want and slap/click it without disrupting my carefully honed, trademark slouch.
If I need a contextual menu I just hold the mouse down for an eigth of a second and there it is, in less time than it would take to regrip the mouse for a right button click. The main difference is that I find the Apple method far more relaxing than the multi-button way and I like it much better. Would a two-button mouse save me valuable web-browsing time? Would it make me a more efficient web-browser? Please, the terms don't even apply.
There are many other instances where a one-button mouse makes sense and is arguably better than more complicated ones, and it turns out that those instances happen to coincide with the most common applications that most people use. Further, the one-button design truly is easier for beginners, but that isn't because it is necessarily less capable. I like simple solutions and, for where it applies, I really, really like Apple's mouse better, than the multi-buttoned options.
Who Moved My Mouse?
Now many of you will disagree with my opinions here and you're more than welcome to do so. If you have need of a multi-button mouse or if you simply prefer one, I am personally delighted to tell you that they are available, inexpensive and fully supported by the MacOS. Our difference in viewpoints disturbs me less than you can possibly imagine.
But what does bother me (if only a little bit) are the insistent voices badgering Apple to switch to a two-button mouse (Ok, some of you say three-buttons...let's really complicate the issue.) and it worries me that someday Apple might actually listen to them and suddenly the Macintosh just won't be quite as pleasant - at least for me.
I like things the way they are, thank you, and believe it or not so do a lot of other Mac users - a majority I strongly suspect. But it is a silent majority because keeping the status quo isn't the sort of argument that really brings out the vote.
So I hereby cast my vote - Apple: Keep the one button mouse!
Copyright 2003, Del Miller. All rights reserved.
Thoughts on how many buttons the Macintosh mouse should have? Drop me a line here.
Del also writes the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com
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