Hans-Martin Mosner <hmm at heeg.de> wrote:

> 
> The first "real" mice I've worked with were ugly as hell (looked like a 
> half-sphere with buttons attached to the front) but passed the main 
> usability tests:
> - they had 3 buttons
> - could be held with rounded fingers (your hand grips around the mouse 
> instead of resting flat on it)
I had one of them! Blue, heavy, quite noisy mechanism but really quite
comfortable. 

> That was so much easier on the hand than anything else which I met 
> afterwards.
> Another idiocy which I'll never understand is mouse acceleration. It 
> breaks muscle memory, a main factor of mouse usability.
Yes, it completely voids the 'direct' pointing aspect since moving from
point A on your desk to point B and back will not neccessarily put the
cursor back in the same place.


> And don't get me started about optical mice! Not the good ones I saw at 
> Xerox SIS which would work perfectly well on any structured surface, but 
> the crap that became commercially available later... Even relatively new 
> (2 yrs) logitech mice have such a jumpy positioning behavior that it's 
> almost impossible to accurately select small-font text. Give me a good 
> rubber-coated steel ball any time.
The DSP based optical mice are generally quite good in my experience.
At least they kept the 'tangential' property of the mechanical mice, so
that moving your hand in an anatomically sensible arc corresponds to
left-right. The early opticals that needed the little grid-pad were
really annoying because you had to move in actual straight lines aligned
to the grid.

Bitpads/graphics tablets are less of a problem despite having that same
property because they tend to be used with a pen and involve those
different muscle groups. With large bitpads one tends to move the
entire arm a good deal. I've even (so long ago it was clockwork and
steam powered) used a CAD system with a bitpad that was Imperial size
and almost required climbing gear to reach all of it.

tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: VMB: Verify, then Make Bad