;)
I decided that since my right shoulder kept crackling, that it was time for me to change from a mouse to a trackball..
And so the search began..
I categorize trackballs into 2 categories:
1) "Thumb" trackballs
2) "Hand" trackballs
The thumb trackballs are as they sound, they are trackballs where the ball is controlled by the thumb only. I am left handed and although I have mastered the use of a mouse with my right hand, I just can't get a thumb to do that much..
So I looked for a hand based trackball..
I wanted a scroll bar on the trackball, but all the ones that had it disappeared. I have to say that I use the scroll almost as much as I use the left click, and so it was a feature I HAD TO HAVE.
Well.. basically none of the trackballs fulfilled my requirements, and so I will probably start my own company to make a trackball...
It seems like Microsoft makes a pretty good trackball, or they use to anyways.. I guess those were the Bill Gates day huh?
But there were 3 I considered:
1) Kensington Orbit
2) Kensington Expert Motion
3) Logitech Marble Mouse
The old Kensington had all the features I wanted, like a scroll wheel, but the new ones don't. The Kensington Expert has a 'scroll ring" around the ball, a great idea but from all the online stuff I've read, most weren't so happy with it... and my God.. the price!!
So it was the Kensington Orbit vs the Logitech Marble Mouse left.
Well, I didn't see any Kensington's and the Logitech's were MUCH better priced.
I ended up buying the Logitech Marble Mouse.
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Scrolling & Middle Click
So the software it came with was called Setpoint 4.2, which was a piece of crap. Don't bother installing it.
Instead, download MouseWare 9.80.
Scrolling: Set it so that when you press both buttons, it is set to Auto-Scroll. This gives you up and down functionality as far as scrolling, and the ball then scrolls.
Middle Click: Mouse Properties -> Buttons Screen, select Button #2, and then click "Modify". If you have set it to Auto-Scroll (Not Universal Scroll) it will give you an option of Chording the two buttons to produce a middle click.
I don't know about you hacks with low IQ's on IE (It's not me saying that or a linux bigot saying that, it's just a statistical fact, look it up..), but I use Firefox, and so middle click is LIFE. Without middle click, your life will be an utter POS...
So there you go, this is the trackball I have chosen, and these are the reasons. I'm sure The Kensington Orbit would probably have been just as good, but I couldn't get a hold of it here to try it out.
As far as the "smoothness" of the ball, it's quite smooth, It takes about 2 hours to get use to it, and then there's not much thinking involved.
So far, every app has been pretty easy except for photoshop.. But since I know CAD designers etc.. use a trackball, it then probably is my ineptness and not the ball itself.
The Logitech ball uses what is called "Marble Technology", it uses dotted speckles on the ball itself; 2 lasers in X and Y orientation is shot and bounced off a mirror reading the dots on the trackball. This way, it never gets dirty. There are 2 colors to choose from, a red trackball and a gray one, I have the red one.
I now have two of these: one at home and one at work.. I hope this fixes up my shoulder tendonitious..
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Tips and Tricks:
One of the things I found was that my coordination was not good enough to get a nice straight vertical scroll from the ball. So I did something I thought was neat and so I thought I'd share.
Because the ball is a ball, I press my middle finger against the SIDE of the ball, acting like an axel point against the ball. Now with your fore-finger, you can scroll vertically and it will scroll straight up and down because your middle finger prevents the wobble.
