Design
In contrast to the motion-sensing mechanism, the mouse's buttons have changed little over the years, varying mostly in shape, number, and placement. Engelbart's first mouse had a single button; Xerox PARC soon designed a three-button model, but reduced the count to two for Xerox products. After experimenting with 4-button prototypes Apple reduced it back to one button with the Macintosh in 1984, while Unix workstations from Sun and others used three buttons. OEM bundled mice usually have between one and three buttons, although in the aftermarket many mice have always had five or more.
A mouse click is the action of pressing (i.e. 'clicking', an onomatopoeia) a button to trigger an action, usually in the context of a graphical user interface (GUI). "Clicking" an onscreen button is accomplished by pressing on the real mouse button while the pointer is placed over the onscreen button's icon.
The reason for the clicking noise made is due to the specific switch technology used nearly universally in computer mice. The switch is a subminiature precision snap-action type; the first of such types were the Honeywell MICRO SWITCH products. (See micro switch.)
Read more about this topic: Mouse Button
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“The reason American cars don’t sell anymore is that they have forgotten how to design the American Dream. What does it matter if you buy a car today or six months from now, because cars are not beautiful. That’s why the American auto industry is in trouble: no design, no desire.”
—Karl Lagerfeld (b. 1938)
“Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life ... for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,—some of its virus mingled with my blood.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)