OpenOffice Mouse Features 18 Buttons & Analog Stick

Although I enjoy the odd fast-paced game now and then, whether it be a single-player FPS or an online game, I’ve never found myself upset at the number of buttons found on my mouse. As long as I have a scroll wheel, back and forward buttons near the thumb-rest and of course, the left and right mouse buttons themselves, I’m golden. Some gamers would disagree with me I’m sure, as companies such as SteelSeries and Razer have released mice in the past with 10+ buttons. There’s obviously a market for it, somewhere.

I admit… 10 buttons on a mouse sounds a little ridiculous to me. With that many, the mouse sounds less like a gaming mouse and more like a peripheral with a very specific purpose, such as for design work. Well, carry that thought over to the OpenOffice.org mouse, or OOMouse for short, which features 18 (EIGHTEEN) buttons. I first noticed this late last week, but I assured myself that it was a joke. But based on the  amount of press it’s been receiving, and the fact that it’s using the OpenOffice.org name, it doesn’t seem to be.

Given the name on the mouse, OpenOffice, one might assume that it’s designed for that application only, but that’s not the case. In a press release posted late last week, the company boasts support for a variety of applications, such as Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk AutoCAD, Microsoft Office and of course, OpenOffice.org.  Notice that all four of these are design-related applications? It might be a good time to note that the mouse even includes an analog stick on its left side…

With the 18 available buttons, users can configure using a wide-range of options, including the ability to mimic up to 52 key commands – that is, to assign a command such as CTRL + A to a button. The focus might be on design, but the company behind the OOMouse, WarMouse, boasts huge gaming potential as well, listing specific titles such as World of Warcraft. The mouse might seem a little bizarre, but the company’s prepping for a launch in early 2010, and will sell it for $74.99. If there’s a best part, it might be that it’s cross-platform, with drivers promised for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

The OOMouse includes default profiles for the five core OpenOffice.org applications based on 662 million datapoints compiled by the usage tracking facility incorporated into OpenOffice.org 3.1. These profiles can be easily customized to suit the user’s preferences using the included OOMouse setup software. The setup and customization software is an application that will be released as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3 in the first quarter of 2010. Default profiles for 20 other games and applications are also included; the OOMouse supports up to 63 profiles to be stored simultaneously in the mouse’s memory.