WarMouse - a development blog

Blackstone had a request: We’ve been hearing a lot about the (excellent) software, but do you think that you could go into some detail on the hardware, specifically the updated designs, in a future blog post? After all, on the homepage the “blue key” version of the mouse has been noted to be deprecated in favor of a matte black and red color scheme? Do you think you could go over any new ergonomic and aesthetic features of the current Meta?

Of course. There were 14 changes scheduled made in the change from the MkIII prototype to the MkIV prototype. We haven’t received them yet, so we can’t show any pictures, but we can certainly talk about the ones that are relevant to the appearance and ergonomics of the Meta. The two most important things are that we lowered the height from 44mm to 40.5mm and slimmed down the bulbous rear end of the mouse. These two factors meant that the average-sized hand had the tips of the index and ring fingertips resting on L1 and R1 while one’s wrist was on the table surface rather than the pads. While piano teachers would have approved the need to keep the hand slightly raised in order to press the front-row buttons properly, it did tend to tire the wrist a bit over extended sessions. A side-view of the two 3D models should show the difference in shape between the two body styles rather clearly. The MkIII that has been featured in past pictures is above and the new MkIV is below.

As for ergonomics, that’s a very good question that requires two answers. First, we believe that ergonomics concerns function, not style. Not having to move your wrist at all, or merely twitching a digit, puts less strain on the human body than a repetitive wrist motion. In that sense, the Meta is far more ergonomic than the most funky, form-fitted input device out there. But, of course, that’s really not what anyone means. Consider, then, what most people consider to be ergonomic mouse-style. This generally consists of two things, a curved thumb rest and a slotted pair of finger rests. The Razer Naga is a good example of an “ergonomic” mouse, its painfully messed-up placement of buttons 4 and 5 notwithstanding. But do either of these things apply to the Meta? Not really. The curved thumb rest is out for the rather obvious reason that there is a joystick upon which the thumb will rest; a curve is not only pointless but would tend to compromise the structure of the joystick shaft. As for the finger slots, the A5 and B7 buttons provide grooves in which the index and ring fingers fall, while the gap between the A buttons on the left and the B buttons on the right permits the middle finger to rest comfortably in between them in a position to spin the scroll wheel. We’re not claiming that we won’t be able to do better down the road, nor are we under any illusions that we have reached the height of ergonomic perfection, but if using the Meta doesn’t quite feel like immersing your hand in warm melted butter, it’s not at all uncomfortable either. The average user will probably be surprised how little movement is involved in using the Meta, as you can do more with two thumb twitches and a pair of slight finger presses than you can with five vast back-and-forth sweeps of a conventional gaming mouse.

As for looking cheap, that’s mostly an artifact of the prototype process. What you’re seeing now is thin plastic shells painted black. We’ll be using a high-quality molded plastic that should allay any fears on that score; we’ll also have a rubberized grip on the joystick as well. As it turns out, the concave shape of the joystick probably rendered the rubberization unnecessary, but it won’t hurt and should give the Meta less of a pure plastic appearance. Another thing to keep in mind is that despite the power specs, this is not a pure gaming mouse. We named it the Meta, not the DeathKillaz 666 for a reason, after all. Based on the information people are providing us when they pre-order, as many people will be using it for various non-gaming applications as they will for MMO and FPS games. So, we never intended to paint metaphorical flames on it, even though the little beast has the equivalent of a turbojet under the hood compared to the average gaming mouse’s conventional six-cylinder.

We’ve just added a small, but significant feature that will make the joystick even more useful for WarMouse Meta users. One thing that we’ve learned from using the prototype Metas over the last two months is that while the buttons are quite useful, the joystick simply blows them away in terms of its ease of use. While clicking the buttons is much easier than moving the mouse pointer up to a pull-down menu or toolbar, flicking your thumb is even faster and more automatic. So, we’ve now added a special function called “altstick” that is assigned to the joystick click; this allows you to assign different commands to the joystick directions depending upon whether the joystick is pressed in or not. Below is a new variant of the Thunderbird mode utilizing the altstick feature. Whereas red denotes “keypress” and grey indicates “key or macro”, the yellow signifies a) which button is assigned the altstick trigger, (it is a keypress variant, so no double-click is permitted), and b) the four alternative commands. If you’ve downloaded the mode layout spreadsheets for laying out your own modes for your games and applications, note that J2=J1 alt, J4=J3 alt, J6=J5 alt, and J8=J7 alt. So, in the Thunderbird mode shown, moving the joystick up will “Mark as Read” an email while moving the joystick up while holding it in will “Attach File” to an outgoing email.

We anticipate that most default modes will make use of this feature, but it’s entirely optional in case you prefer to have commands assigned directly to the joystick click and double-click, (T1 in WarMouse Meta-speak). And if for some reason you insist on having both the T1 click/double-click AND the altstick feature operative, it’s even possible to assign the altstick trigger to one of the A1-B7 buttons. You can even assign it to T2, however we don’t recommend that except to mutants with two thumbs on one hand or lefties with especially dextrous little fingers.

Future WarMouse Meta users have been busy this week. New game and application mode layouts have been sent in for Command & Conquer Red Alert 2, Eve Online, Freespace and Freespace 2, Overlord, Solidworks, Starcraft, and Visual Studio 2005; they have already been converted to working Meta modes. At WarMouse, we’ve mostly been busy with production-related issues and adding a new joystick feature that we’ll introduce next week, but we did manage to create an Akalabeth mode that provides the long-awaited solution to the annoying Command? (A)ttack – Which weapon? (A)xe – Swing or Throw? (S)wing dialogue. No doubt the rest of the planet will see our fixation with this as a quixotic obsession, but after 31 years, the damned AAS problem has finally been solved!

Seriously, in more than three decades of Akalabeth, who in the royally revered name of Lord British ever threw away an axe? And yes, it probably is overkill to use the world’s most sophisticated mouse to play a 108k, 2-bit RPG from 1979, but then, overkill is the heart of the WarMouse Meta.

But that philosophy of design overkill applies to modern games and applications too. Beginning today, it is our intention to post a game or application mode each weekend here for public review. This week’s mode is Eve Online, created by MB. If Eve Online players have any comments or suggestions for improvements, make them here. And if there’s a mode on the application or game list you’d like to see posted next week, let us know.

We’ve tested the Meta running on Windows 7 now and the Modeware really looks much better on 7 than it does on XP. It’s even nicer on the Macintosh – and we hope to post a screenshot soon – but we still have a DLL situation to resolve before the Meta can be said to be completely functional on the Mac. We also hope to have some exciting news about expanded joystick functionality in the near future, for varying values of exciting. Thanks to all of those who have already pre-ordered a WarMouse Meta; we are working hard to get them to you as soon as we possibly can.

There are two more images of Meta Modeware running on Windows 7 available on the Modeware page.

We’re pleased to announce that the WarMouse store is open and you may now pre-order your WarMouse Meta or WarMouse logo mouse pad. We are offering a 20 percent discount on Meta pre-orders; please note that all pre-orders made via the online store will be processed immediately. A pre-order form for those who wish to pre-order a WarMouse Meta but do not wish to have their credit card or PayPal account charged until the ship date will be posted later today. Congratulations to Steve from Great Britain, who was the very first WarMouse buyer!

If you would like to pre-order a WarMouse Meta but would prefer not to have your credit card or PayPal account charged immediately, please download the WarMouse Meta Pre-order Form, fill it out, and email it to us. We will send you a confirmation that your pre-order has been registered and send a second email requesting confirmation of your order before it is processed when the production units are ready to ship.

It’s the 15th, as some of you have been helpfully reminding us, and we are working hard at getting the online store open so that orders can be placed. We are also pleased to announce that we will be giving a discount to orders placed before the mouse ships. We have already ordered the parts required for the initial build, however, due to the time required for the tooling it looks as if we will be shipping sometime in April. Preorders can be placed one of two ways. The first is through the store. The way the store is set up requires the credit card to be processed immediately, so please don’t place your order via the store unless you want to pre-pay. Orders processed through the store will be given a 20% discount from the retail price. If, on the other hand, you want to place a pre-order but don’t want your card charged immediately, the second way to preorder is to send an email to store – at – warmouse.com containing all of the necessary information, including the card number, the expiration code, the three-digit code, and the billing and shipping addresses. We will not charge the card until we are ready to ship. We will also send you an email asking you to confirm the order. The discount on these emailed, non-charged preorders will also be 20% from the retail price. Both of these discounts will be made available until we are ready to ship.

The retail price is presently $74.99, €65.99, and £59.99, plus shipping charges, depending upon which country your shipping address is located. VAT will be charged only if applicable. Due to the present limitations of the online store capabilities, UK and European prices will be converted from the US price at the current exchange rate. Thanks to present currency valuations, this will result in a small savings for UK and European buyers who order via the store. In the UK, the shipping charge will £10 for UPS Standard (Next Day). In the USA it will be $7.50 for Priority Mail (2-Day, more or less). We will have European shipping prices on Monday. This post will be updated with a link to the online store once it is ready to go live, which looks as if it will be on Monday, January 18th.

When we issued our first press release, we received some criticism due to what was perceived to be an overly complicated user interface for the software used to customize the Meta mode settings. We took no exception to this criticism, mostly because we completely agreed with it; it is perhaps worth pointing that the software was not yet done at that point. Since we have reached a state where the software now does most of what it is supposed to do, we have been able to turn more of our attention to the outstanding interface issues. The challenge facing us is that on the one hand, most people don’t want to think about their mice and certainly don’t want to have to make any difficult decisions about how it operates. On the other, it’s impossible to take advantage of all the power and customization available to the Meta user without making a number of decisions about the various mode settings. Some are easy: analog joysticks don’t work in World of Warcraft so nearly everyone will prefer the digital directional joystick setting. But the choice between having six keys and ten keys at your disposal on the joystick in Microsoft Word is entirely subjective.

So, we’ve taken the approach of having an initial screen which is similar to the conventional mouse software that most people are accustomed to seeing. Here you can set the mouse pointer and click speeds, the CPI resolution, and choose the mode’s joystick setting without being alarmed by all of the button reassignment business. You can also decide whether the mode should autoswitch or not when you go into the related application; for example, if you’re in the habit of popping into Notepad just to copy something, perhaps you’d rather not have the Meta switching out of Firefox mode. The Basic View is essentially a means of adjusting the general mouse settings by application mode without having to have your mind blown by the full extent of customization possibilities and it is the default screen that appears when you fire up the Modeware. Below is a screenshot of the current Windows version in operation.

As is probably apparent from the screenshot, clicking on the Advanced button will take you to the Advanced View. This consists of a more complicated screen which shows all of the various game and application commands and allows you to do the mode-specific button assignments as well as mode management and modifications. Anything that can be done in the Basic View can also be done here under the pull-down menus and dialogue boxes.

Over the holidays, I reluctantly sent off my Meta and replaced it with the Razer Naga for two weeks in the interest of grokking the fullness of the current competition. The Naga is a multibutton mouse designed predominantly for MMO games such as World of Warcraft and it is an attractive combination of inconsistent design with excellent production. It looks great, it feels really good when you place your hand upon it, and the initial impression is that it is a very high quality product. Being a competitor, we are of course completely biased, but we also understand that ignoring the good points of the competition isn’t going to help us continue to make better mice. So, feel free to take these comments with a grain of salt or take issue with them if you see fit.

Good points: The appearance of the Naga is a little unusual, but it is an unexpectedly pretty mouse. The rubberized coating on the top feels very nice and contrasts well with the shiny black plastic on the sides. At rest, the ergonomic curves comfortably tilt your hand about 10 degrees to the right. The laser is a high-resolution one and the LED-lit, rubber scroll wheel is fairly quiet and smooth. I quite liked the blue LED inside and the way that it illuminated the 12-button keybad on the left side of the mouse as well as the Naga logo on the mouse rear. The bottom pads are slick and the mouse has very nice movement across the desktop even without a mouse pad. The microswitch action on the L1 and R1 buttons is quite sensitive, but not too sensitive for normal pointing-and-clicking. It is smaller, less blocky, and more aesthetically pleasing in person than it tends to appear in some of the photos. The custom driver software is well-integrated with World of Warcraft.

Weak points: The ergonomics only feel nice so long as you don’t attempt to use the scroll wheel or any button that isn’t L1 or R1. The core problem is the aforementioned hand rotation. This means that the mouse designer made an understandable, but inherently bad mistake in placing the M4 and M5 buttons on the forward left edge of the mouse; they would be much more useful and comfortable if they were on the forward RIGHT edge and used by the middle finger, but having to move your index finger to the left against the rotation of the mouse puts strain on the second knuckle and I started feeling pain there after the second day. (This is essentially the same problem that can occur when using the Meta in a V-grip instead of a W.) Only five of the number pad keys are very useful- 1-3, 5 and 6 – as it’s difficult to automatically locate 4 and 7-9, or angle your thumb back sharply enough to reach 10-12. The sensitivity of the L1 and R1 keys actually becomes a problem as well, for as we learned with our first prototype that featured buttons on both sides instead of the joystick on the left, side clicks require a non-zero amount of gripping action. It’s not much, but just enough so that about 20 percent of the time the user will inadvertantly click either L1 or R1 while clicking one of the number pad buttons. In order to reliably prevent this from happening, one has to lift both fingers off the mouse, which isn’t difficult, but does happen to be annoyingly easy to forget.

Comparative points: The basic mouse technology is similar. The Naga is prettier and superficially more ergonomical while the Meta is more comfortable in practice. The Naga buttons are much less programmable than the Meta buttons and joystick. The number pad buttons are more useful for gaming than they are for non-gaming applications; it’s not a problem to reassign the Crouch function in CoD from the letter C to the number 5, but you really can’t reassign Ctrl-R in Mozilla Thunderbird that way because it would reply to an email every time you wanted to type a 5. The three most important differences are: 1) the Naga number pad buttons are just that, number pad buttons, while the Meta buttons and joystick directions are whatever the user wants them to be. 2) the 12 side functions available via T1 (joystick) and T2 on the Meta are easily accessible while 7 of the 12 Naga number pad buttons are not. 3) The Naga has nothing like the autoswitching capabilities of the Meta because its inability to store different functions assigned to the same button by application renders that moot.

Verdict: The Razer Naga is a very good mouse with much more functionality than the average gaming mouse. However, it is not as functional or as powerful as the WarMouse Meta; the joystick, in particular, was missed. The Naga is a more sensible comparison for the Meta than the Apple Magic Mouse, but it would be safe to expect that most impartial reviews will tend to favor the Meta.

We’re sorry we weren’t able to finish in time for there to be a Meta in your stocking this year. We wish you all a Merry Christmas anyhow.

We have now added the ability to adjust the laser’s CPI/DPI resolution to Meta Modeware, but instead of pursuing the usual “on the fly” system where you have to manually adjust the resolution each time you want to change it, we have incorporated this ability into the Meta’s autoswitching. This means it the resolution will change automatically for you in precisely the same way that the button functionality does. The Meta supports a range of 100 to 5,600 CPI/DPI, so this can be quite a useful feature. We’ve also significantly improved the joystick’s accuracy in Digital 4- and 8-key modes to such an extent that 8-key mode is now actually usable by non-concert pianists. It would still probably take a bold power user to dare to use such a mode, but our most recent testing indicates that one can achieve much more reliable results with 8 different keys assigned to the 8 joystick directions than we’d initially expected. With the four clicks/doubleclicks on the joystick and T2 buttons, this means that we have as many “buttons” on the left side as the Razer Naga without counting any of the 14 buttons on the top of the mouse.

16-key functionality, however, is highly improbable, although we could certainly do it if it was deemed necessary.