I feel sorry for the people who must have worked hard to make this mouse happen. Sure, it’s not the peak of industrial design, but I really don’t think it deserves universal ridicule. Much of the criticism seems to focus on the complexity of the thing, comparing it to Apple’s ultra-simple designs. Given the target market — hard-core gamers and intensive technical applications — this seems like the wrong comparison.

It’s not the first mouse with more than a handful of buttons:

• Logitech make (or made, I’m not sure) a 12 button mouse.
• There’s a 17 button mouse also designed for playing MMOs.
• Then there’s the monster of the Belkin N52TE.
• Or the 3DConnexion SpacePilot Pro takes us into another league altogether.
• And it’s hard to forget the Steel Battalion dedicated controller.

I bet there are equally complicated control systems available for niche, technical, professional applications that I don’t know the Google keywords for.

The announcements of most of the above generated much excitement and exclamations of lust, rather than the derision the OpenOfficeMouse has received. The difference is the mis-match of the design with what we expect for the field.

The OOM site describes how the mouse was originally conceived to play games (like most of the above) but the team then decided it would be useful for non-gaming applications too. So we have a mouse with a design which is — in the world of technical, dedicated controllers — probably unremarkable rather than terrible, getting the kind of attention usually devoted to a fetishistic gaming accessory.

If this mouse had exactly the same feature-set, but was finished in black plastic, with plenty of curves and a blue neon glow, everyone who’s asked “Is this a joke?!” would be saying “OMG! WANT!!”

The problem isn’t that the mouse has too many buttons and features — there are other mice with more.

The problem isn’t that it has appalling design — it’s poor and uninspired, but it’s not the worst thing ever.

The fundamental problem is that the product is aiming for two very specific, probably unreconcilable, niche audiences (hard-core gamers and hard-core office workers) while associating itself with a brand (OpenOffice) that wants to be completely mainstream.

While everyone’s knee-jerk response is to laugh at the number of buttons and the uninspired design, the basic source of the humour stems from the mis-match between requirements, expectations, design and marketing. They are all at odds here, and all working against each other.

This mini-site/game was developed with Six To Start and they’ve written more about the rest of the Experience’s social media escapades. The game creates a way to explore the world of the show, get to know the characters and the locations, and reveal video, audio, and ways into the characters’ Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, etc.

There’s a zoomy, scrolly, explore-y scene and, if you find everything hidden within it, a more lively clicky, shooty, score-y pointy game with a bonus video if you do well enough. Every week a new scene and game will appear.

It’s been a challenging project but, eventually, very satisfying technically. I’ve been responsible for all of the coding, with a PHP back-end (that doesn’t need to do a great deal) and an enormous amount of JavaScript at the front. I’ve learned a lot.

The zoomy, scrolly scenes are created using OpenLayers, the open source mapping engine. It’s extremely flexible and powerful, although that means it can be a struggle to work out how to achieve the thing you want to achieve that no one else has achieved before. Time allowing, I’ll write up some of the things that took me a while to piece together.

We’ve also added the ability to log in through Facebook Connect, which not only lets you tell everyone you know what you scored, but also allows you to save your progress and retrieve it next time you visit. Which is very nice. Although making sense of the unorganised morass that is Facebook’s developer documentation, and keeping up with the shifting sands of their platform, is not the most pleasant of web development experiences.

Anyway, we’ve launched, hurrah! Go, look! Congratulations to the lovely designer, Dean Vipond, everyone at Six To Start (including Dan Hon, Kim Plowright and Robin Ray), and everyone else involved.

Big congratulations to the LRB team, plus Zelda Rhiando who did all the “IA/user interaction design, prototyping and design implementation”. Few people are lucky enough to always work on sites they actually use, so it’s very nice when it happens.

At first I just noted some details in the comments of each photo (in both iPhoto and on Flickr), eg:

50mm 1/60 f5.6
Kodak Tri-X 400

Which is better than nothing, but is pretty ugly. And, these days, plain text feels rather dead and not a useful way of storing such information. Only a dumb old text search would find me all the photos shot with a certain lens or film, for example.

A year ago Paul Mison wrote about extracting EXIF data from his Flickr photos and putting them into Flickr machine tags, those ugly computer-readable tags that associate other kinds of information with photos.

It made sense to add the information I wanted to store into machine tags. It would have to be manual, but that’s not too hard, given how much time I already spend on applying metadata these days. I copied the kinds of tags Paul was generating and added them to my own photos:

camera:make=pentax 
camera:model=k1000 
film:brand=kodak 
film:iso=400
film:name=kodak tri-x
lens:focal_length=50mm
lens:lenstag=pentax 50mm f/1.7
lens:make=pentax
lens:min_aperture=f/1.7

But this doesn’t cover information about the individual shot — shutter speed and aperture. I chatted with Paul and looked round his machine tag browser but there didn’t seem to be much widespread use of what I wanted. So I made up my own tags for this purpose:

photo:aperture=f/5.6
photo:shutter_speed=1/60 sec

Which does the job. Now I can see all my film photos shot on Kodak Tri-X (er, all of them) or with a shutter speed of 1/15 sec.

Looking at the latter URL, which has translated “1/15 sec” into “115sec”, I can see there will be a conflict with any long exposures measured in whole seconds. Maybe there’s a better format to use?

Anyway, just thought I’d write that up in case anyone else was wondering the same thing, and also wanted to simply copy someone else’s method.

(If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about… Foursquare is an iPhone app and a website that lets you “check in” at different locations and score points for doing so. You can see where your friends have checked in, and try and beat them and strangers in the high score tables. It only works in a few cities so far.)

It’s quite satisfying, and several friends are using it and, despite not going out much recently, I’ve been using Foursquare when I do. But I’ve felt a nagging frustration: for a game involving points and leaderboards, there seems to be a weird lack of rules. Surely games have rules, even if not rigidly enforced from a rulebook?

Maybe I’m being weirdly English, or uptight, or just me, but it feels like everyone playing the game has their own idea of what kinds of places you can check in to. Should you check in when you get to work? When you’re at the supermarket? What about at home?

If one person is checking in to every building they enter, while another is only doing so in more sociable places — pubs, restaurants, etc — then the latter is never going to do well. And so they either have to live with the fact they’re a low-scoring loser or stop playing the game.

So I asked my Foursquare-using friends what places they check in to. I wanted to get a sense of what was normal among my crowd. I gave them a list of types of place and asked which ones they check in to. I assumed sociable venues are a given — if there’s any ultimate point to Foursquare then engineering social coincidences must be part of it. I also assumed people check in at work, which seems popular, but in retrospect that may have been assuming too much. Never mind.

I had thirteen responses, and they show the wide variation in how people are playing the game:

It’s as if everyone’s standing on a field with a ball, but some are trying to play rugby, some soccer and some American Football. It’s impossible to tell who’s really winning.

Maybe I’m getting too hung up on the scoring thing. But if it’s not important, why is it there? And, as I first thought, it initially feels like just enough incentive to remember to check in, so I can see it’s a useful feature.

But I soon started to feel like a mug for being restrained in the places I chose to check in to, and the whole competing for points thing is starting to feel remarkably un-fun. If Twitter gives you the fluffy, qualitative inkling that others are probably having more fun than you, Foursquare gives you the certain, quantitative assurance that they really are having more fun. Just look at the numbers! Either that or they’re cheating.

So, while I initially thought the points were a good incentive, maybe they’re not helping. Or maybe I’m just odd and don’t like competition being introduced into something that should be friendly and social. It doesn’t feel polite. Or maybe I’d be happier if there were more standard rules and some way — peer pressure alone? — to enforce them.

Now that I can stream, at no or little cost, most of the music I’d want from services like Spotify, why am I paying for “physical” files? What is it that I’m buying?

What is it, in fact, that I’ve already bought? I have 19,471 tracks in iTunes, something the 14 year-old me, having spent Christmas record tokens on his first two vinyl albums (No Jacket Required and Brothers in Arms, since I like to imagine you asking), would barely be able to imagine. But 19,471 tracks is nothing compared to the several million available on Spotify.

Looking at the costs objectively there’s no comparison. If each track I own is, for the sake of argument, worth 50p my music collection would cost nearly £10,000. That’s 83 years of Spotify premium membership.

If we look at Spotify as a subset of all available music, and my iTunes library as a much, much smaller subset of that, then I’ve spent thousands of pounds on nothing but a playlist.

OK, there are differences, that help make my library worth spending on.

• There are many things in my library that aren’t available on Spotify and never will be.
• There is still something important, to me, about owning the music, that particular selection of music. Barring disaster, it will be with me for the rest of my life.
• My library has history, layers, a gradual accumulation over my life. It’s not just a playlist but a timeline that in itself is important.

And there are two things here, two things about the amount of music available.

First, it’s a shame if people stop buying and downloading music and rely solely on Spotify-like streaming services. They may be choosing from a vast selection but it’s still only a commercially-available subset of all music, chosen by a company.

But, second, having said that, what I like about my music library is that it’s small. Relatively. I know my way around it. I feel daunted by having to choose between six million tracks on Spotify. Where to start? Option paralysis. My music library is a reflection of me, a reflection of my life since I bought my first CD. As I’ve grown up, the city has also grown, from hamlet to metropolis. It will keep growing, but it still carries my history within.

Which makes me think about sharing large playlists on services like Spotify. Forget lists the size of a mixtape or a radio show, TV soundtracks or festivals. I want to explore John Peel’s entire record collection, or Greil Marcus’s. Or browse every track ever broadcast by Radio 1. I think. These are big, bigger than a conventional playlist, but they’re a manageable, coherent space within all music in which to explore. I wouldn’t pay £10,000 for someone else’s record library though.