• she/her

Once and Future Gamedev, Leftist


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.


MorningSong
@MorningSong

A difficulty with this question is that there are... by my reckoning three broad categories of trackball that feel very different to actually use.

  1. Thumb trackballs. These are the most common, i think, and generally the most affordable. They generally have a very small ball, and the rest tends to just look like a mouse that doesn't move. The Logitech Trackman Wheel or Elecom Ex are the ones I'm the most familiar with. I hate these.
  2. Index finger trackballs. These have a slightly larger ball towards the front. Elecom's Deft or Huge , Microsoft's Intellimouse Trackball and Trackball explorer fit this bill. They generally have a slightly larger ball and I like them a little better.
  3. Palm trackballs. These are the big boys. Kensington's Export Mouse, CH Products' DT225, and the X-keys CST series. They tend to be very expensive and are the kind i like the best.

And liking any one of these does not necessarily correlate with liking any of the others. Making it potentially a several hundred dollar process to find out if you "like trackballs."


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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 @MorningSong's post: