If you followed a bit of geek news over the last weeks, you probably heard of two new mouses that saw daylight (yes, those that geeks use, not feed). One was released by Apple, the Magic Mouse, and one was released by an Italian company WarMouse in Orvieto, the OpenOfficeMouse or OOMouse. I have no hand-on experience with either of the two. In fact, the Magic Mouse may not even have reached the stores while the OOMouse is still in prototype (but ready to order).

The two products make me wonder where in the world we are going? I'm a (notorious!?) Apple fan, I love the simplicity where possible while I can use lots of stuff under the OSX hood for work. There you go, shoot me ;-) . I'm not a fan of their closed business model though. I love GeoFOSS and dedicate almost all my working hours to developing, promoting and selling services around it through GeoCat.

So what is it that these announcements do to me? I'm not sure. The news about the Magic Mouse with no buttons made me smile; we can apparently even live without the last button and mini scroll ball and still use it. A big "Sigh" escaped me when I heard a geek talk about the OOMouse in a radio broadcast last Saturday. The OOMouse offers 18 programmable mouse buttons with double-click functionality, 63 on-mouse application profiles, 20 default profiles for popular games and applications, including OpenOffice.org 3.1, Adobe Photoshop, the Gnu Image Manipulation Program, World of Warcraft, and the Call of Duty series and much, much more.

Wow!

It can do much more. So much, I won't repeat it here. Read for yourself, it is great!

I'm crying. I'm not a geek, it was confirmed to me by one simple announcement on the radio and one list of features on a webpage. I fail to remember what my one-button-mouse offers. I can't imagine what a second, third or fourth button on a mouse would do for me, but we're talking 18 buttons here... How I wish this is an April fool.

I try to get as many people hooked on to using a geospatial metadata catalogue, GeoNetwork opensource. It is not an easy task. Metadata is boring and making a software that does not show that fact is not all that easy. An 18-button-mouse does not help me to convince people that us open source folks try to make software that is usable by the masses. I'm asking those-that-love-18-button-mouses to buy them and then silently use them, but not bother me with them. I already bothered you ;-) And I now have the perfect geek visit planned when we have our third Bolsena Hacking Event in June 2010, only twenty minutes drive from WarMouse in Orvieto.