Balls! The bane of my life! I’m talking about balls of the rodent variety and mice generally. I get more calls for help with sticky or unresponsive rats than any other piece of hardware. I often have to replace worn out microswitches and strained cables, but cleaning detritus and fluff from mouse rollers is an everyday occurence and to be honest, a pain in the rump. Optical mice offer a limited solution, in that they have no balls to pick up dust, sandwich crumbs and cigarette ash, but they have problems in certain lighting conditions and you still end up with wrist ache when using them for precision work.
I acquired a Chic Trackball a few weeks back and it has changed my life. No more wrist strain, four buttons AND a scroll wheel and the most accurate and precise control of the pointer I have ever encountered. I work in graphics resolutions of upto 4096×3072 on 72 inch display systems (doesn’t everyone?!!) and no mouse comes even close to a trackball for speed and precision at those sort of resolutions. Not only that, but it is so much easier to keep clean and takes up very little desk space.
Input devices are largely a matter of personal preference, but has anyone else found that after using a trackball, using a mouse is like going back to using a 9600bps modem after having broadband? Or have you tried a trackball and just couldn’t get to grips (pardon the pun)with it?
As an experiment, I gave all the troops at work a ‘go’ on my R&D machine to see if they liked the trackball, and only 1 guy out of 19 didn’t put in a request for one!
