Can’t stand trackballs. I think it has to do with my thumb, though–it is just about the least natural thing I can think of to “pull” with my thumb to move the cursor downward. Awkward, imprecise, almost painful if I reach the limits of travel.
Mice, on the other hand, are perfect. I have my sensitivity cranked to the maximum, and from one side of my 30" screen to the other is about 1.5". I basically hold the mouse with my fingertips, and have very good precision.
Another part of this is that the natural position of my fingers is slightly curved (enabling in and out motion), while for my thumb the natural position is fully extended (which means I can’t just immediately push the trackball up).
I’ve gone for an upright mouse instead of the standard flat one–puts the hand in a more neutral, comfortable position, especially for longer gaming sessions.
I’ve used the trackball you’re talking about - it looks like a mitt. It was one of the first optical pointing devices.
You might think a mouse is a mouse, but no. There is a HUGE difference between cheap and expensive mice. I think you are using the wrong mice. Firstly, DPI. If you need to cover a large range of pixels with 1 sweep of your hand, and still need precision, you need a certain number of DPI that normal mice don’t have. Get at least 3000 DPI. Normal mice are, what, 800? Secondly, I have never experienced any problems with my wireless mice (all Logitech). No lag, no drop-out, and certainly no reconnection. Try a good quality mouse and see.
Even mousepads, most people think, “oh, I have an optical mouse so I’ll use my desk”. No. There is also a big difference in sensitivity and ease of movement.
Pointer control depends quite a great deal on the motor control strengths and deficits of the user.
My thumbs have pretty poor control and a great deal of shakiness in side to side motion, and even with the speed turned way down a thumb ball is nearly impossible for me.
Corded mice are not too bad, though I hate the cord pushing business and on any computer exclusively for my use, if there’s a mouse, I rig up ways for the cord to be suspended above the mouse to minimize this. Cordless mice never seem to work well for long, and they interfere with other hardware nearby.
The old style Logitech trackball is not too bad, and for a laptop in a crowded space - say, one connected to instruments on a crowded workbench - I can live with it.
Laptop touch pads are workable but only with “tapping” turned off, because my hands are a bit shaky. If tapping is turned on, it’s like letting a baby play with the mouse, randomly clicking all over the screen.
My favorite device is on my home Mac – the Magic Touchpad. It’s a touchpad with about 10 X the area of a laptop touchpad.
Now, what I wish for, and toy with as a possible product to develop, is an alternate mouse, so there’d be two mice connected to the system. One of them would be much “faster” and the other much “slower”, and they’d be on either side of the keyboard, and I could fine tune the pointer position when I needed to (for example in selecting or dragging things while working on graphic content).
That already exists - sort of. A lot of higher-quality gaming mice have a switch to adjust the DPI setting of the device, so with two clicks you can go from full speed to incredibly fine control.
I have a 3-monitor spread only when I don’t have a 4- version. No combination of mouse speed and acceleration allows me to sweep the screen widths AND have decent precision. I do the full spectrum of graphics work on my workstations, so I need all the visual real estate I can get combined with maximum short-range precision and accuracy - and on an ergonomic keyboard drawer with limited mousing space.
So I can’t use high mouse tracking rates (means short-radius precision is jittery as hell) or a large desktop area for mouse movement, and even the best “acceleration” settings don’t combine the two. With a trackball, I can move the pointer one pixel at a time with no particular effort, give it a hard spin to snap from the far right to the far left or vice versa, and still keep my control sweep in a comfortable, low-strain ergonomic range.
Having a big monitor sweep that does not need precise control as well is a different setup, and high acceleration and tracking rates probably work fine, along with a couple of square feet of mouse travel.
But not precision - not when the screen sweep is around 40 inches across.
To make it clear, this is not a discussion about standard mice on a standard single-screen computer being used for office, browsing and other moderate-precision tasks. It’s not even about gaming, which is a lot less precise than most gamers think it to be. It’s about using a monstrous sweep of screen space for high-precision work for eight to ten hours a day - meaning that ergonomics are extremely important, and flapping your arm around a two foot circle all that time is wearying and potentially damaging.
You absolutely have to be talking about the center-ball types, in which case I agree in every respect. A thumb-ball trackball allows you to lay your arm on a comfortable rest and never move it until you need to reach for your coffee cup. It’s about as restful, zero-effort and anti-RSI/CT as you can get.
I reached the point where I wouldn’t let employees use even their own wireless mice and keyboards (and would buy them any wired equivalent) - because they/I ended up spending hours every week fighting just to make the things connect in the morning or reconnect during the day and stay stable and reliable. Nothing pissed me off more than walking into the office and watching our HR person “accommodating” to a mouse pointer that was jumping and skipping and freezing because she’d already reset everything twice that day. FUCK cordless console gear.
You’ve probably heard of them, but if not, do a search on “Mouse Bungee”. I’ve been using one for 10 years. Got one on sale cheap, and wouldn’t be without one now.
As others have pointed out, any decent mouse these days has on-the-fly DPI switching, for a range of sensitivity from flying across the screen with a nudge, to very precise pixel-by-pixel movement, and each setting is custom selected by you. Click a small button on top of the mouse to switch between sensitivities. Gaming mice have done this for years. I think some mice are up to an INSANE 8000 DPI now, so some real speed and sensitivity is possible.
I’ve preferred and used track balls since I my first PC type computer. All but the first were Logitech. Currently, I’ve got two M-570s (cordless thumb operated). One’s for my laptop and the other is for my desktop. I was pleasantly surprised to discover they do NOT interfere with each other. I guess it’s like those ergonomic wave type keyboards. Some folks love them and some folks won’t have anything to do with them.
There’s some major PEBMAC going on around here. I’ve had the same wireless Logitech mouse for 2 years and it’s never given me a bit of trouble. I have a wireless mouse at work that’s also Logitech, and also great.
Sure, shitty wireless mice exist–spend money on a decent mouse and you won’t have *any *problems. I have tons of electronic devices in one compact space in my bedroom: my computer, boyfriend’s computer, two mobile phones, two tablets, lots of speakers, several monitors, all that jazz. It still works great.
Trackballs are weird, but I can appreciate their usefulness for people with CTS.
All of the cordless keyboards and mice I’ve had trouble with are mid- to upper-end Logitech and Microsoft. I wouldn’t expect anything but junk performance from no-name equipment, but I would expect about 90% fewer problems with a $60 MS mouse or $120 Logitech mouse/keyboard set.
I think mice are pretty weird, to be honest. It’s just that they became the dominant input method and they’re cheap to make. I suspect that anyone willing to approach the problem with an open mind would find the thumb-ball trackballs to be a superior tool, with a longer list of advantages than mice’s disadvantages. But there have been so many really terrible trackball designs over the years that I fully understand the haters’ loathing for them.
I think you are 100% wrong about mouse precision; a high quality mouse with a high quality reasonable large mouse mat is easily much more precise than your trackpad, especially over medium distances. Now you essentially seem to want very low speed with the ability to cover a huge distance without picking up your hand, and that is going to be a good fit for what you are using, but in no way is your trackball going to be as precise at say, going exactly one screen width over, if you have it set that slow.
The difference between cheap mouse + desk and good mouse + pad is huge though. Something like this is so much more precise it is unreal:
Now that said, a good trackball is way above other laptop type pointers, which is why it sucks that they all moved to touchpads, since IMHO the precision goes
[ol]
[li]I have used a thumb-ball trackball for nearly twenty years.[/li][li]I have used mice on many systems, both briefly and long-term. I’ve tried or used almost every positioning device ever made, include the vaunted SpaceBall. (Hated it, but it needed ten more years for really suitable technology.)[/li][li]I tend to use quality gear in all cases.[/li][li]My needs are not those of someone with one 17-inch screen.[/li][li]The combination of pointer speed and “acceleration” or “enhance pointer precision” or whatever each maker calls it can accommodate wide, fast movement with slow, precise positioning without any need to switch modes on the device. However, it works poorly with mice because you still need too much free space for the large movements.[/li][li]I need to make 5,000 pixel moves followed by micro-distance control all day, day in and day out. It’s not some unusual combination with one app or one game or whatever. It’s how I work, 50 hours a week.[/li][li]If I’d ever found a better combination that lets me make those huge moves AND those small moves AND lets me rest my arm comfortably the entire time AND fits into an ergonomic work area WITHOUT requiring even a standard mouse-pad area and offset of my arm… I’d use it.[/li][li]The endless “improvements” in mice strike me as a perpetual attempt to fix the unfixable. But I’ll concede that mice are good enough for most users’s needs.[/li][/ol]
I had to give up on mice nearly a decade ago. I use a trackball now. A Kensington Orbit Elite. I’ve also got a Logitech M570, but I prefer the Kensington as I’m left-handed. For a while I used a pen and tablet, but that didn’t work too well when I switched to dual monitors.
Using a Logitech G700: corded/cordless, laser, adjustable DPI with 5 custom settings, macro buttons, etc. I use two monitors, a 1920x1200 and a 1680x1050, and it takes under an inch of mouse movement to go from one side to the other, on 4000DPI. That’s not even the highest setting. It’s perfectly precise for most activities without turning the sensitivity down. For things like using Photoshop, or sniping in games, I can turn the setting down and easily go pixel-by-pixel. Never use acceleration crap.
Thanks - I had not picked up on this until reading your post. This caused me to start browsing mice on Amazon.
Brief hijack – what does “gaming mouse” imply exactly? I understand that “gaming” means “playing computer games” and I presume you need to be precise or fast or something to play a computer game, or perhaps if people play them often it tends to wear the mouse out. Does “gaming mouse” just mean “nicer mouse” or is there something more specific?