[HN Gopher] Logitech iFeel Mouses (2001)
___________________________________________________________________
Logitech iFeel Mouses (2001)
Author : xattt
Score : 32 points
Date : 2023-05-17 09:30 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dansdata.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dansdata.com)
| [deleted]
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Hahaha, oh man. This reminds me of all the naughty stuff people
| did with the Novint Falcon. It was another failed feedback device
| that at its height could simultaneously be associated with the
| Half-Life series and adult toys.
| DanHulton wrote:
| And yet console controllers have vibration feedback as a
| standard feature and have for YEARS and years now, without
| people making an outsized stink about the potential naughty
| applications.
|
| I wonder why that is?
| lostgame wrote:
| Who cares? Rez literally released an honest to God vibrator
| as a legitimate product, I think for no other reason than to
| stir up noise.
|
| People will find whatever the hell the want to use to get
| off, always have, always will.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Having the mouse/trackpad react when you hover over a clickable
| thing is not a bad idea - especially given the sort of flat,
| affordance free UIs that are popular these days. I find myself
| habitually flinging the pointer around constantly to see where
| clickable things are. I could fling the pointer around without
| looking at it.
| vinodhn wrote:
| This reminds me a lot of what Lexus used to do in their cars.
| Their Remote Touch interface was literally a mouse with a
| pointer and the mouse would latch onto buttons as you moved the
| pointer around the screen. Very odd infotainment interface haha
| sschueller wrote:
| I had one and I loved it. Too bad they stopped making them.
|
| Imagine being able to feel a grid that you want to snap something
| on to. It was great.
| xattt wrote:
| For one reason or another, these mice seemed like an amazing feat
| of technology at the time. I'm disappointed they never caught on.
| macjohnmcc wrote:
| The idea was better than the execution sadly. I had one of
| those mice and it never really felt like you gained much with
| the vibrations etc. I'm sure had it been more widely adopted it
| might have become much closer to the promise.
| ge96 wrote:
| blocked by malwarebytes wonder why
| lproven wrote:
| I had one of these! I bet it's still in a box somewhere. It
| worked quite well... but not in anything after WinXP, sadly, and
| never in Linux.
|
| It worked quite well. It was handy to be able to feel the mouse
| "drop" into the trough of a scroll bar, and then bump back out
| again -- you could aim by feel, without looking.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _you can get feedback whenever the mouse moves onto a clickable
| thing on the screen - a window, an icon, things on the Taskbar -
| and you can also get feedback when you 're performing tasks like
| sizing a window or moving a scroll bar._
|
| MacBook trackpads already use haptic feedback to simulate the
| tactile feel of clicking.
|
| So in theory you could easily replicate the "iFeel Mouse" effects
| with the hardware in trackpads today.
|
| Does macOS expose API's for any of this? Or has anyone figured
| out a way to hack it with code? Or is it all hidden away deep in
| inaccessible firmware?
|
| I would be exceptionally curious to know what it feels like, if
| whenever I moved my cursor across the tab bar of my browser, I
| felt a tiny bump between each tab. Or if I felt a little
| indentation when I slid into a text box.
|
| It's easy to imagine it would become very distracting very
| quickly if it were overdone, but I can't help but wonder if it
| could be done in a subtle way that actually felt natural and
| helpful?
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| I wonder how much battery power the thumping consumes. It is
| very convincing, to be sure. For the most part I'd prefer real
| switches, but haptic feedback when moving the cursor across UI
| elements can be pretty cool. Can't say I've encountered it in
| any applications I use, though.
|
| There are two major failures with the MacBooks' trackpads:
|
| 1. They're too big. You can't put your hands on home row
| without frequent spurious UI interactions. Most often this is a
| click being erroneously interpreted as a right-click, because
| the pad detects that your non-clicking hand is still in contact
| with the pad. But frequently when I'm typing, the cursor jumps
| to some other part of the page or edit box. There's just no
| reason for such a large horizontal area; you essentially never
| use the whole width of this giant pad for horizontal scrolling
| or side-to-side movement.
|
| 2. The giant trackpad can't be used with the Pencil. This is
| just baffling. Its surface area is plenty big enough to be
| useful as a drawing tablet, but the Pencil doesn't work on it.
| Why? I'd buy a Pencil today if it did. At least then there'd be
| a payoff for the dumb size of the pad.
| g_p wrote:
| There is an API available for haptic feedback through the
| touchpad, but I can only recall it being used when the pad is
| "pressed" (i.e. when you are dragging) - many graphics or
| design tools use it to create a "notch" when items align.
|
| PowerPoint has this for example - dragging something around to
| move it will give a haptic click when aligned with center or
| another object.
|
| It would be interesting to see if this API can be used when the
| user isn't dragging something to move it.
|
| Edit - this seems to be the API -
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nshapticfee...
| hbn wrote:
| Apple's force touch trackpads are still wild to me. The fake
| button they used on the iPhone 7 and 8 wasn't particularly
| convincing to me, they kinda just feel like the bottom of the
| phone is vibrating. But the trackpads are so uncanny I almost
| didn't believe it wasn't moving until I tried clicking while
| the machine was powered off and it didn't do anything.
|
| Also the fact that you can click in, and then do a further
| harder click that feels like a harder bump "in" than the first
| one, and when you start releasing pressure the click
| intensities reverse "out" as you'd expect. I usually use my
| laptop docked at a monitor with a full keyboard and mouse, but
| when I am undocked I find myself frequently playing with the
| trackpad click cause it's still so novel to me.
|
| It's always fun to tell more casual MacBook users that the
| trackpad doesn't actually click cause they usually have no
| idea.
| causality0 wrote:
| I'll still never understand why Samsung dropped the same
| tech. Take a galaxy S8 and push in where the physical home
| button used to be and it clicks in an incredibly realistic
| manner. Long since dropped it though. Terrible shame, since
| it was by far the best way to turn the phone on.
| bombcar wrote:
| Dan's Data - there's a name I've not heard in decades!
| boyter wrote:
| I used to love reading his columns in the pages of atomic mpc.
| A name that always makes me smile.
| runamok wrote:
| Same. Does anyone know what happened to Dan? Last post in 2015.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I loved that blog, was one of my favorites back in the day
| along with the lovely daily cartoons at userfriendly.org and of
| course the old slashdot.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-19 23:01 UTC)