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Pointing devices


leviramsey

Preferred Pointing Device?  

27 members have voted

  1. 1. Preferred Pointing Device?

    • Mouse
      16
    • Pointing stick
      2
    • Touchpad
      6
    • Trackball
      2
    • Write-in vote (in comment)
      1


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Prompted by posting this from my mom's laptop (I'm upgrading the file/mail server at her house for the first time in years) and remembering why I detest touchpads, especially ones that have strips on the sides to make up for the lack of scrollwheel goodness.

I rank the options

1. Pointing stick. It's a pity that only IBM really ever used these (does Lenovo still include them); they may be the perfect pointing device for a keyboard jockey like myself. You can use them without moving your hands from a typing position, they don't get in the way like the wrist rest integrated devices do, and they're quite precise in my experience.

Combine with the greatest keyboard ever and it's input nirvana.

2. Mouse. While it's the second least convenient for a keyboard jockey (detached trackballs are even worse, simply because trackballs suck), I place greater value on difficulty of these devices getting in the way while typing. I imagine these two qualities are linked, come to think about it.

3. Trackball. Perhaps even deader than the pointing stick, I don't really have much experience with these. Their advantage over touchpads (at least in laptop applications) is that a mislaid finger will normally only result in cursor movement, not a click. The detached trackball must be the most pointless pointing device ever.

4. Touchpad. Quite possibly the biggest ergonomic disaster in the history of computing. If there were some way to hook up an 80-column punch card reader to a USB port and a driver that would allow that to function as a pointing device, I'd probably rank that ahead of a touchpad. I'm pretty sure that I've cited the prevalence of touchpads as a refutation of the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deity. They are truly an Evil Problem.

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Prefer a mouse. took me ages to get used to my laptop with a track pad, was forever barely touching it when typing and that would move the cursor and send anything 'd typed to pot. Got used to it now, doesn't bother me.

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I like to point, at weekends, for leisure purposes, with a pointer. I find them both pointy and appropriate.

I go out into the wilderness, look for something some way off, perhaps a tree or a distant house, and then, for fun, I point at it with a pointer. I'm getting quite accurate now. I once pointed at a building, barely visible behind a ridge, with an error factor of only 0.5 degrees.

One day I'd like to progress to pointing at the stars, of a night time, but that's too much at the moment. The warders take me inside before nightfall, and take away the pointy objects.

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Me likes videogames. So the mouse. I **** hate touchpads. I have never tried a pointing stick. Havent used a trackball in a while except for the one on the computer at my daughters nursery.

I think touch screens will be common in 5-10 years though. Apple has made them popular, so people will get into the idea of using them more and more. With that other companies will join the race to make good touch screen interface and as a result the price of the technology will come down. Its pretty obvious that handheld devices are going to go that way pretty soon, I dont think it will be too long before computer monitors follow suit. I guess the biggest stumbling block will be balancing the best material to use for touch screens (glass) against the size/weight of new display technology. The tablet computer Microsoft tried to get people to buy a couple of years ago will probably come back into fashion though. I think that thing was ahead of its time.

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Mouse. After all it's a swedish invention. :nod: (Got nothing to do with me being useless in computers and not knowing anything about those short cuts some talks about)

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the mouse was only invented to make computers more friendly to the wimmin in the office who were scared of computers / electricity. The best thing about keyboard shortcuts was the way microplap used to change them between releases of office to keep you on your toes - now they seem to have stabilised.

In order:

touchpad

mouse

trackball

joystick

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