After three years in development, Microsoft’s brand new Touch Mouse is nearly ready.
The great thing about the Touch Mouse is that as well as being the traditional pointing device for moving the cursor around the screen, the TM is a combination of laptop track pad and regular mouse. In short, a mouse within a mouse, Mouseception, if you will.
Additionally study of the TM’s capabilities and little hints from Microsoft themselves reveals that the mouse is integral as a part of upcoming Windows 8. Apparently the mouse allows the user to swipe gestures along the TM’s surface, allowing gesture functionality, rivalling Apple’s multi-touch track pad.
The TM includes a healthy array of gestures, such as a forward and reverse swipe to control going forward and back on a webpage, which helps browsing galleries, web pages and folders.
The simplest, most useful gesture is the one you’ve never seen on a mouse or a track pad before but you use it all the time on a touch screen; swiping sideways with your thumb to go forward or back. Use it to browse through a gallery or photos, to skip back a page in your Web browser or you navigate up and down through folders in Explorer.
Swiping up from the back of the device allows Windows 8 users to open up a menu, which has been seen in interface demos.
The device also supports multi touch, and allows you to reposition windows, minimize and maximise, with functionality controlled by the amount of fingers swiping at once. Two fingers swiped down minimises, two fingers up maximises. Similarly, two fingers left or right positions the window on the left or right of the screen
Three or four fingers swiped down allow you to minimise all windows and show the desktop, while up accesses the Instant Viewer, a more powerful suite for accessing individual currently open windows.
As these features seem so amazing, Windows 8 and the Touch Mouse will be a partnership everyone will want to have in their office.