“From ‘no-button’ design and multi-touch controls, to wireless technology and laser tracking, Apple mice have seen a lot of changes over the past decade or so,” Luke Dormehl reports for Cult of Mac. “In terms of the biggest changes with Apple mice since 2000, there are few better people to talk to than Abraham Farag, Apple’s former Senior Mechanical Engineer of Product Design. Today the owner of successful product development consultancy Sparkfactor Design, Faras was part-responsible for many of the big innovations with Apple mice named above — and was able to shed light on how they came about.”
“‘It all started with a model we did not have time to finish,’ he says,” Dormehl reports. “‘It looked like a grey blob,’ Farag says. ‘We were going to put that model into a box so people wouldn’t see it.’ However, when Jobs turned up things went awry. ‘Steve looked at the lineup of potential forms and made straight for the unfinished one,’ Farag says. ‘That’s genius,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to have any buttons.’ ‘That’s right, Steve,’ someone else piped up. ‘No buttons at all.’ The meeting, it seemed, was over. ‘[Afterwards], Bart Andre, Brian Huppi and I left the room and huddled outside with each other, [saying] ‘how are we going to do that?” Farag recalls. ‘Because of that unfinished model we had to invent a way to make a mouse with no buttons.’ …The team managed it and the no-button mouse — called the Apple Pro Mouse — began shipping in 2000.”
“The Apple Pro Mouse did well, but the team was keen to push the concept further,” Dormehl reports. “In particular, they wanted to make the leap from a zero-button approach to a mouse that featured multiple buttons. Making this look attractive from a design perspective was hard. Convincing Steve Jobs that it was a good idea was harder.”
Much more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]