Trackballs Can Be Better Than Mice
The growing proliferation of graphically oriented software is making it increasingly difficult to navigate around the computer screen by just moving up, down or across with the cursor keys.
Until recently, the solution generally has been to hook up a mouse, which enables diagonal movements. The mouse, first popularized on Apple’s Macintosh, is a palm-sized device that rolls around a desk top on a single hard rubber ball about the size of a shooter marble, or slides across a special pad inlaid with a grid pattern. It has its own screen pointer, separate from the keyboard-controlled cursor.
Lately there has been a proliferation of an alternative pointing device called a trackball. Basically it is an upside-down mouse with a bigger ball that you roll with your fingers or the palm of your hand. The theoretical advantage of a trackball is that it occupies a small, fixed amount of space on your desk, while a mouse must have room to move around. In reality, you can easily confine the movements of a mouse to the same space occupied by the trackballs.
I find that trackballs are better for small, precise movements needed in computer-aided design or some drawing programs, while a mouse is preferred for the more sweeping movements used in controlling pull-down menus and other features of applications such as word processing.
Both trackballs and mice have two or three buttons on them with which you signal the computer, usually to select some command or function marked by the pointer position on the screen. Whether there are two or three buttons, you usually use just the left one, sometimes clicking it once or twice to mark a selection and sometimes holding it down while moving the screen pointer with the mouse or trackball to command a secondary action.
RollerMouse is a $170 trackball from CH Products Inc. of San Marcos. Measuring 5 by 5 1/4 inches, it has a 2-inch diameter ball, largest of the group. There are two buttons on either side of the ball, large ones at the 4 and 8 o’clock positions and smaller ones at the 2 and 10 o’clock spots. Normally the lower buttons work like those on a normal two-button mouse and the upper buttons let you click and lock onto an object. That locking ability is important in a trackball, because, unlike a mouse, it is difficult to hold down a button and move the ball simultaneously such as you must do when sliding down a pull-down menu.
A set of eight switches underneath the RollerMouse allows you to control its configuration. Southpaws can reverse the function of the buttons. Upper and lower button functions also can be switched and cursor speed adjusted.
The MicroSpeed FastTRAP, $149 from MicroSpeed Inc. of Fremont, Calif., measures 4 1/8 by 7 1/2 inches with a 1 7/8-inch ball and three buttons arranged horizontally above the ball. A wheel above the buttons can control a third dimension, such as depth in a three-dimension drawing application, if you have any software that supports such a feature. I don’t know of any, and none is identified in its manual. The middle button is used to click and drag an object such as pull-down menu or to draw a line in a paint program.
The Mouse Systems PC Trackball, $119, from Mouse Systems Corp., also in Fremont, is designed with its three sculpted button just below the 1.5-inch ball. With a base measuring 4 by 5 1/2 inches, its ball is meant to be moved with the fingertips rather than the palm. The previous two could be used either way.
There is no way to reverse the function of the buttons for left-handed users. Instead, you can turn the unit backwards when placing it on the left side of the keyboard, which reverses the buttons and places them above the trackball. Clicking and dragging requires depressing the middle button along with the left button.
Yet another way to build a trackball is offered by Logitech with its $139 Trackman. Logitech Inc., also headquartered in Fremont, designed its 1 1/4-inch ball to be controlled with the user’s thumb. The ball is offset well to the left side of the unit, with three buttons above and to the right. Overall dimensions are 5 3/8 by 4 1/4 inches.
The manual shows how the Trackman can be turned to be used by left-handed operators, although it seemed awkward to me. In addition, the functions of the left and right buttons can be switched with a software command.
A feature that none of the others offered is the ability to run both the Trackman and a Logitech Mouse simultaneously for genuine two-fisted drawing.
I could get used to working with any of the four trackballs, but I would miss the ease and flexibility of a mouse. It is difficult to move the screen pointer in a straight diagonal line with a trackball, while it is easy with a mouse. The choice will probably depend on what kind of applications you use. For simply invoking menus and dragging them down to make selections, I found the mouse much easier and faster than the trackballs. Marking text in a word processor, or highlighting cells in a spreadsheet is likewise much easier with a mouse.
The same is true when using paint graphics programs. I couldn’t move smoothly across the screen with a trackball.
However, for computer-aided design work where you typically select a series of tangent points or other delineation marks and let the computer draw the lines in between, the trackballs, using fingertips, were easier to control than a mouse for small, precise movements.
Of course, if you have a desk so perpetually cluttered that a mouse would need bulldozer tracks to negotiate it, a trackball may be your only sensible alternative.
