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
