Speaking of technological visions, as the Dread Ilk are aware, I am not in the habit of making assertions that I am not fully prepared to back up. In light of this, Markku and I have created a means of verifying our claims regarding the speed of our new mouse interface. While this is designed to permit one to test the Meta interface against the traditional interfaces, it also happens to serve as an excellent means of testing one mouse against another on the traditional point-and-click interfaces. We also included 20 of the most common hotkeys simply to see how the three mouse interfaces fared against it, but that’s really neither here nor there since practically no one uses more than five or six of the basic ones and you don’t leave your finger positioned over the Ctrl key in normal usage.
So, if you’re interested in trying it out and seeing how fast your mouse is against the best and average times of our interface, you can download the 5.3 meg zipfile here. Unzip it, click on the executable, and you’re in. First maximize the window, then select the interface you’re testing under Options; you can’t use Meta unless you have one, of course. Click on the black button with the blue logo to start the timer and it will stop once you click on the correct icon or menu. The logo will flash green, the timer will stop, and the logo will turn blue again, waiting for your next click.
Do at least 20 to get an average score, although 100 is better. If you have a high performance gaming mouse, please email me with the mouse model and your best average for 100 on icons and menu. You can see how it compares with my scores and the development team’s record scores below – I managed to beat the best single time but couldn’t maintain that pace. And if you can beat Markku on his Logitech MX-518 on the menus, (34.19 for Menu 20 at 1920×1200 resolution), I’ll be very impressed indeed.
