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Re: gEDA-user: Trackball at work?
On Saturday 26 June 2004 03:53 pm, Shahab Sanjari wrote:
> Is there anyone there who uses a trackball as a pointing device at
> work? For more than 2 months, my wrist became really uncomfortable and
> it started to ache after a few hours of working with mouse. Recently
> it is aching all the time, and since yesterday, I am keeping it warm
> with a bandage.
Shahab, I strongly advise you to perform regular wrist stretching
exercises if this is the case, in addition to whatever other measures
you are taking to mitigate this problem. I have very sensitive wrists
as well, and as a practicer of Aikido and formerly of Yoga, I am aware
of some wrist stretches that, at least for me, helps out a great deal.
Note that stretching is no substitute for good ergonomics; but it does
help relieve some of the pain and stress in the wrist. I stretch
regularly, sometimes multiple times per day on particularly bad days.
> are still not precise enough, I still need practice. Is there anyone
> who has come back to mouse after using a trackball and having lost the
> hope of making precise movement with it?
I think it's primarily due to the size of the thumb-driven trackballs.
They're so small that even the slightest muscular jerk will result in
significantly large enough mouse movements to me annoying. If they made
thumb-trackballs with larger sphere sizes, I think that might be useful,
but alas, they do not. :(
I used to be a very, very good aim with an Alps Glidepoint (the
capacitive, flat, trackball-like things you find almost universally on
most laptops today). While it does take some practice to get good at
it, I have been very happy overall with them. I only wished that they
made it easier to drag-n-drop with that design.
Another pointing device that I got *very* good results with was the IBM
Trackpoint (not to be confused with the Glidepoint). This device was
basically a rubber pencil eraser coupled to a four-way pressure
transducer -- thus, essentially a joystick. The only disadvantage to it
was that it appeared between the G and H keys (assuming standard QWERTY
layout), which sometimes interfered with touch-typing. If only they
produced trackpoints in large numbers external to the keyboard...
--
Samuel A. Falvo II