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Meta Modeware release 1.0.5
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OPERATING SYSTEMS:
* Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, 7
* Linux Fedora, Ubuntu
Meta Modeware 1.0.5 is now available as a Windows Installer or as Linux source code. More details regarding specifics of the 1.0.5 release will be added soon; the installer also includes the Metalocity 1.0.5 speed-testing program.
None of the information it contains will be new information to regular readers here, but we put out a press release this morning on the release of Metalocity, entitled High-Performance Gaming Mice Don’t Perform. Slashdot has already picked it up and we are sending out a mass email to the media this afternoon. We are already at work in turning Metalocity into an effective training tool; editable, application-customized pull-down menus and toolbar icons will be included in Metalocity 1.1.
NEW FEATURES:
* International keyboard support. Be sure to copy keyboard.xml to the My Documents/Modeware directory. Currently supported keyboards: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Austria, and Great Britain.
* Optional default CPI and Pointer Speed setting. Don’t forget that it will be necessary to Update All Modes when the default is changed. * Default mode option. Autoswitching default to Mode 1 when in an application to which no mode is assigned. Assigning Basic Mouse mode to Mode 1 is recommended.
* L1 and R1 macro record buttons in Edit Function.
* HID scancode support in macros. Usage Page 7 is supported.
BUG FIXES:
* Left and Right are no longer reversed in Analog Sim.
* Joystick oversensitivity in Analog Sim fixed.
* Pointer Speed slider now available in Add/Edit Mode in Advanced.
* Improved keyboard parser for macros.
The zipfile for 1.0.5 beta 1 can be downloaded here. It includes the executable modeware.exe, which should be copied into the Program Files/Modeware directory. It is recommended to first rename the extension on your current 1.0.4 modeware.exe to preserve it for backup use although you can always download the 1.0.4 installer from here if you need a new one. The beta zipfile also includes the keyboards.xml file which must be copied into the My Documents/Modeware directory or the Vista equivalent. It is possible to add additional international keyboards to the xml file by using Wordpad, (but NOT Notepad). If you do add an international keyboard, please send it to us so that we can add it to the 1.0.5 installer that we will create after the beta testing. Modeware will automatically detect your keyboard, and if it has a match for it, will make use of it.
Modeware behavior is designed to not fundamentally change between updates, so the Force US Keyboard setting will be initially active on all of your current modes. You can check to see what keyboard you have by seeing if the Tools menu shows a “Display My Locale” option. If you do not see any such option under Tools, you are using a US keyboard and no action is necessary. If you have non-US keyboard that is recognized by Modeware, go into Advanced/Edit Current Mode and switch off Force US Keyboard for all desktop applications. However, you should leave it on for those games that only support US keyboard. If you have a non-US keyboard that is not one of the seven international keyboards currently recognized by Modeware, you should also leave it alone since Modeware will default to the US keyboard whenever a user’s keyboard is not found in the XML file.
As some of you are aware, we were wrestling with problems stemming from an expired security certificate on the North American store that made it difficult to place orders last week. After an extended odyssey though various IT departments worthy of Kafka, we finally got the certificate renewed and installed correctly and that store is now accepting orders as it should. We still have a mysterious bug in the European store, which causes credit cards to be denied at the point of processing if one creates a customer, leaves the store, and later comes back to place an order. This does NOT happen when one creates a customer and places an order in one go, so if you’re running into this problem, let us know, we can delete the first customer ID, and you can then register and place the order. Obviously, until we hunt this bug down and get it fixed, we recommend that you not create a customer on the European store if you are not actually going to place an order at that time.
On the shipping front, the European mice have had their scroll wheels stabilised and are now shipping. American mice are presently waiting for the piece required for the stabilisation to show up, which is scheduled to arrive this week. As soon as that piece is added, the mice will be sent out to the new orders who are now waiting for them. Once we have shipped mice to the new customers, we will arrange for those whose scroll wheels have been locking up to send them back to us for the same stabilisation fix; as before, we will pay for the shipping. On the software side, we expect to release a beta version of Modeware 1.0.5 for Windows and Linux in a day or two.
Finally, on the marketing side, we will be releasing a press release announcing Metalocity and the competitive performance results which have been compiled by a well-respected third party. We’re very interested in compiling similar data for various games, so if there are any Starcraft II players in the WarMouse community who track their RPM, we’d like to hear from you and discuss the best way to gather empirical data on your performance with various gaming mice.
UPDATE: The necessary parts for the American mice arrived on Wednesday night and we’ll be getting them out as soon as they’ve been modified and tested.
AB reviews his new Meta and gives it 5 stars:
“A very nice looking mouse. I was surprised by the build quality. Very powerful software and many possibilities, this input device is like a separate computer. The Meta is a MUST if you use a lot 3D software like Maya and Cinema4D especially with 3DConnexion devices or in full screen mode, and if you use a lot notation software like Finale and Sibelius with their lots of shortcuts and multiple layered keypad section. First you miss the overview and the few big buttons of your previous mouse but after 2-3 days adopting and learning you don’t want to use something else than Meta. You can e. g. control the opacity and the flow of the brushes with the joystick. I always hated noticing the keyboard shortcuts for the opacity and flow. I’ve waiting so long for the ready-to-ship product but it’s worth it.”
You can now download the Metalocity installer, complete with a mini-manual, three Meta modes, and a Razer Naga profile, from the Documents and Downloads page. You don’t need a Meta to run it; we’ve designed it to allow you to test the speed of your own mouse and compare it to the speeds that others are reporting for their mice. And what we’ve learned is that nothing can touch the speed of the WarMouse Meta, which has been empirically proven to be the World’s Fastest Mouse by a significant margin.
The fastest times presently confirmed for the Meta interface are as follows:
One click: 0.39 seconds (B1)
First ten clicks: 6.80 seconds (0.68 avg)
First 20 clicks: 14.17 seconds (0.71 avg)
First 100 clicks: 80.68 seconds (0.81 avg)
First 500 clicks: 428.11 seconds (0.86 avg)
In the process of obtaining these results, we have learned that the Meta’s sustainable interface speed will be between 0.80 and 0.91 seconds for most users. This is 76% percent faster than the sustainable speed of the icon toolbar interface, for which a 500-click test time of 757.19 seconds (1.51 avg) was recorded. By way of comparison, the average time for 20 clicks on the conventional Menu and Icon interfaces for the Logitech MX-518, the SteelSeries WoWmouse, the Razer Naga, and the WarMouse Meta was 34.16 seconds (1.71 avg). The SteelSeries was the slowest and the Razer was the fastest, but the range for best time averages was from 33.51 to 35.89 seconds. This confirms our initial data indicating that the Meta interface is more than twice as fast as the conventional Toolbar/Menu mouse interface. But there is no need for you to take our word for anything. Download Metalocity and determine the results for yourself.
If you’ve been curious to know exactly how much the WarMouse Meta can improve your interface speed, your PC productivity, and your game performance, you can now begin to quantify that to two decimal places. While we were certain that the Meta interface is significantly superior to the conventional point-and-click interface utilized by nearly all other high-performance mice, we wanted to be able to say exactly how much better it is. So, we are pleased to announce Metalocity, which is an interface speed test application which allows you to compare the speed of the Meta with your speed using hotkeys, icon toolbars, and pull-down menus. You can use it even if you don’t have a Meta and compare it to the Meta times to see how much faster you would be able to operate if you were using one.
To run Metalocity, first download the installer and run it. If you have a Meta, import the Metalocity1 mode from Program Files/Metalocity and activate it. Then launch Metalocity from the Start menu, maximize your window, and click on the big black button with the blue WarMouse logo to start the timer and receive the first command. Once you click on the correct Meta button or flick the correct joystick direction, the logo will flash green, then return to blue and wait for you to click on it again. To test your speed on the Hotkey, Icon, or Menu interfaces, select the interface under Options. Remember that the window has to be maximized for accurate results when testing Icon and Menu, but for obvious reasons it doesn’t matter when testing Hotkey or Meta.
Metalocity stores statistics so you can see how fast your fastest clicks and selections are as well as your averages and compare them to the best times recorded by the development team. In general, the Meta interface is reliably proving to be around 10% faster than Hotkeys, 75% faster than Icon toolbars, and 120% faster than pull-down Menus. We’re interested in learning if there is any difference in the performance of the various high-performance gaming mice, so if you’ve got a Razer, a Logitech, or some other gaming mouse, please try it out and send us your results along with the mouse model and window resolution you were using. This is just a test of pure interface speed, but in the future, we plan to add features to Metalocity that will allow you to test the application speed of the different interfaces in various applications.
This week, we will be releasing a program that will allow Meta users to verify our claims about the WarMouse Meta’s superior interface speed. As mentioned in the previous post, we have determined that the Meta’s multibutton joystick interface is significantly faster than conventional mouse interfaces even when a high-performance gaming mouse is used. The fastest mouse we have found thus far using the conventional point-and-click interface is the Logitech MX-518, but a longtime Logitech user found that he was able to enact commands 73.6% faster with the Meta than with the MX-518 after only two days of using the Meta. (The best Meta time by a more experienced user was 89.0% faster than the fastest MX-518 performance.) We will be continuing to refine our interface performance tests and intend to publish a report comparing the interface speed of the Meta to the Razer Mamba, the Razer Naga, and other high-performance mice in the future.
However, interface speed is only one aspect of total application speed because using an application necessarily involves other actions than issuing commands. So, we would like to encourage Meta users to think up their own application speed tests and inform us of their results. One of our foremost Modemasters, SuperSijy, has already produced such a test, in which he compared the speed of his Meta in Equation Editor mode to the speed of a regular mouse using the icons on the application toolbars. Since he is an expert with the program and knows the Equation Editor toolbars very well, his application speed is certainly towards the high end of the spectrum. Below are the results of the test, which shows an average application speed advantage of 104.5% for the WarMouse Meta. In other words, the previously calculated interface speed advantage of 110% translated almost perfectly into the real-world application speed advantage in Equation Editor and thus permits the user to work a little more than twice as fast. This will almost surely not be the case in every game or application; we believe the Meta’s application advantages will be smaller in FPS games and larger in complicated applications with nested sub-menus and/or multiple interface screens. But it is definitely an encouraging initial example of the real-world performance results falling in line with the calculations produced by the pure interface testing.
Microsoft Equation Editor test results
We’re in the process of developing a Meta program that you can use to measure exactly how much faster the Meta interface allows you to operate your computer than you can with conventional mice and also train yourself to improve your speed and familiarize yourself with your modes. We are still in the process of refining the test and the program, but the initial indications are rather positive. In fact, the speed advantage of the interface has reliably tested in excess of the 30% we previously calculated on the basis of our OpenOffice word processing test.
Based on the initial results, the Meta requires an average of 0.914 seconds per Meta click. The fastest average for 20+ attempts is 0.7085 per click. This compares with an average of 2.242 seconds per menu selection and 1.605 seconds per icon click. Assuming a 50% split between menus and icons, this indicates a conventional mouse interface speed of 1.924 seconds. So, our initial results indicate that the Meta interface is on average around 110% faster than the conventional mouse interface.
Obviously, the speed of the Meta interface will vary from button to button. A double-click on button B4 can take 1.8 seconds whereas flicking the joystick in one of the four primary directions usually clocks in between 0.50 and .75 seconds. The fastest response so far recorded is 0.41 seconds on button B1; single-clicks on all buttons reliably take less than one second for moderately experienced users. But there will soon be no need to take our word for it, as we will release the speed test program in a few weeks and you can see for yourself how fast you can drive the Meta interface.