The patented 18 button OpenOffice mouse?

It’s not April 1st, so I’m going to guess it’s real. The patented 18 button OpenOffice mouse –

In partnership with the OpenOffice.org community, WarMouse announced the release of the OpenOfficeMouse, the first multi-button application mouse designed for the world’s leading open-source office productivity suite. With a revolutionary and patented design featuring 18 buttons, an analog joystick, and support for as many as 52 key commands, the OpenOfficeMouse is intended to provide a faster and more efficient user interface for OpenOffice.org applications such as Writer and Calc than the conventional icons, pull-down menus, and hotkeys presently permit.

“You can do far more with this mouse than most people are likely to realize at first,” said mouse designer Theodore Beale. “You can launch applications from the desktop, and in your browser you can fire up a specific Internet site with one button, then close it with a double-click on the same button. In Writer and Calc, you can have your most powerful and complicated macros on one row of buttons and simple functions like Bold, Undo, and Format Cell on another. It’s very useful in games like World of Warcraft, because even without taking the joystick into account, you’ve got 16 commands within one click, 40 within two, and all 72 icons on the six action pages within just two double-clicks or less.”

I’m hoping they consider the Chumby-style patent so others could improve on the hardware, perhaps adding more buttons.