Looks like Doug Engelbart agrees with me over the mouse button issue. There’s also some interesting discussion in the comments over on Scoble’s blog that got me thinking a bit more about this. I would agree that the reason we need many mouse buttons is a deficient user interface. The proliferation of mouse buttons is a reflection of the inability of the UI to adapt to our demands.

If the UI were very well designed then it would intelligently adapt the function of the single mouse button to perform whatever task it is that we want to do. If you think about it then under an ideal interface we would have no mouse buttons at all, the computer would just know what the user wants and would do it (whether by a direct neural interface, strong AI or some other method).

However, we do not have an ideal user interface and until we do I want a shed-load of buttons to compensate for the stupidity of my operating system.

Technorati Tags: GUI, Mouse, Technology, UI

Here’s a really cool set of photos from the International Space Station. The ISS reached its 5th anniversary of continuous human presence in space on the 2nd of November. Pictured is a photo of New York City on 11/09/01. Pretty incredible.

Technorati Tags: 9/11, NASA, ISS, space