MewMus

Just a tiny gay creature θ∆

  • Nyan Biney
  • In my early 30's
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@mewmus@meow.social

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
goofpunk
@goofpunk asked:

Are you a trackball guy at all?

Sort of! I grew up with a mix of mice and trackballs (my mother was a diehard baller since the late 80s and still is,) I own several, and... I guess the best way I can describe my feeling is that the trackball feels like the hero we deserve, but I am too small and pitiful a creature to appreciate it fully. I have never been able to main a trackball for very long and I can't fully explain why. They are in several ways objectively superior to mice, and the only real problem I can think of (the mechanical ball gathering dust, etc.) is possibly solvable.

I was just speculating the other day on whether you couldn't simply turn an optical mouse mechanism upside down, mount it to a spherical ultra-fisheye lens, and then have it track the texture of your finger exactly as it does a desk surface. it should work, right? this would produce a trackball with a nonmoving ball, and with modern oleophobic coatings it should be possible to keep it clean.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

i have also logged one hour in the cockpit of the microsoft easyball and if they ever bring it back maybe i'll finally switch


MewMus
@MewMus

I had an EasyBall as a kid and tbh it's possibly one of the most enjoyable pointer devices I've ever used. Like it's obviously flawed with it's lack of a right mouse click, scroll wheel, etc... BUT there was something so satisfying about rolling around the huge egg yolk of a yellow ball to play "My First Amazing World Explorer!"

Computer peripherals should be fun to use!


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

all three in fact, and I love them all in different ways, which is why it's so weird that they just never integrate into my life. i think my least favorite is finger but i have no complaints about thumb. i have also logged one hour on the microsoft easyball

I was just speculating the other day on whether you couldn't simply turn an optical mouse mechanism upside down, mount it to a spherical ultra-fisheye lens, and then have it track the texture of your finger exactly as it does a desk surface.

I occasionally do exactly that when I pull the ball out of my Kensington for cleaning etc. of course it doesn't have the extra optics so there's only a tiny active area to use, but the tracking works fine. I think the main concern with your idea is that now you have a laser pointing to places where eyes are likely to be; it's not dangerous for brief exposure but I'm not sure that's still true for hours on end?

I will of course also take this opportunity to sing the praises of the Kensington Expert Mouse, which if you've only used one-finger trackballs is a thoroughly different experience.

The part i loved the most about track balls was that it kept momentum when you flicked it, and the way it was able to do that was because the wheels that tracked the balls position also acted like ball bearings to let the ball rotate freely. and like with a ball mouse, you would need to awkwardly rotate the tracking wheels to get all the gunk off that it picked up.

i feel like cleaning the ball would always be an inevitability, because hands are dirty and they would leave oils and dirt on the ball, but im wondering if you could somehow merge the trackball with that one mouse with two rotating tilted discs to keep track of where it was, except you would use them to act like sideways ball bearings, and cleaning them up would be a breeze just like the Jack Hawley mouse.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

trackball freaks are such a niche market and the intersection of Brain Tendencies is so specific that I'm now wondering if the issue that's plagued me for the last month, "fwupd bug which makes specifically older revision Kensington Experts functionally unusable on linux", is going to measurably diminish the population still further

Focus FK900 Keyboard

The Focus company made these wonderful keyboards with a mouse built right into the spacebar. I hope some professional video-gamer starts using a keyboard like this to get 10% extra keystrokes per second, so these can become all the rage. With proper switches. And a laser trackball, because if you thought ball mice got dirt in them, imagine if they were upside down all the time.

this would produce a trackball with a nonmoving ball

I feel like the easier solution to this is to make a half-sphere out of Trackpad Material, it's clearly doable since the Magic Mouse uses a flex PCB for it