Productivity and Input Devices

As someone that works in front of a computer all day, both at work and (sigh) at home, I’ve spent a lot of time optimizing my experience there.  If I’m going to spend time working with something I might as well make it as convenient and comfortable as possible.  Which is why I’ve recently been looking at alternative pointer input devices for my computers.

I’ve always been a desktop user, I never got my first laptop until near the end of college, so mice were always my device of choice.  Over time mice have evolved from a quality perspective (ball, to LED, to laser) and from a functionality perspective (2-button, 3-button, scroll wheel, horizontal scroll*, etc), and these additions have added a lot to the mousing experience, but its still not perfect.  On multi-monitor setups you still have to drag the mouse across the mouse pad (and possibly pick it up and move it so that you can continue) to move from one side of the environment to another.  This can be a pain, mentally and on your wrist.

As an alternative to typical mice, I’ve been looking into trackballs. I remember learning about them in my HCI class in college, but never looking any further as they were generally used in CAD and similar design software.  However, one of my friends has used one for years for general computing and she swears by it.  Heck, even Blackberries and the Android phones have a trackball. So in an effort to cement my role as the eccentric ‘kid’ at work I think I’m going to have to pick one up to see if there are any advantages.  I have hope, as it can’t be much worse then the clit mouse.

Finally on to what I really wanted to discuss though: trackpads, specifically Apple’s amazing laptop trackpads.  Multi-touch is all the rage with the iPhone’s surge in popularity, and Apple has applied the same functionality to their newer laptops.  We all know the marketing details, you can ‘pinch’ and ’stretch’ to look at photos, but I think it’s even more basic functionality that is really important.  There is no button, you just press the pad to register a ‘click’, press with 2 fingers for a ‘right-click’, and if you want to scroll just rest one finger on the pad and move another (up/down, left/right, even *SHOCK* diagonally).  This scrolling can be done anywhere, mind you, you don’t have to find the the scrolling area on the right side of most other trackpads. I wont even go over the Expose functionality because it’s not relevant to other OSes, but these tiny features improve usability soooo much anyway.

I use some of these trackpad features everyday on my MacBook Pro (late 2007 model) and it really makes me wish I could have the same functionality on my desktop at work.  It’s feels like I’m in Minority Report with the gesture and finger recognition and then at work I feel less productive.  The closest you get to this with a mouse is something like mouse gestures.  I think an ideal solution would be a mouse pad sized USB trackpad for the desktop, something like Wacom tablet without the pen.  I’ve yet to find anything that fits the bill though and even if one was available it would have to be of a comparable quality to Apple’s existing trackpads before it would really be comfortable to use.

Availability of a product like this though may bring us closer to an environment of ’soft’ input devices such as  Swype, the laser keyboard or Microsoft Surface.  With devices like these and the shift to other touch technologies like the iPhone, I fear that the desktop computer or input devices as we currently know them will be obsolete by the time such a trackpad is possible to release.

*How come horizontal scrolling is not as widely supported as the vertical scroll wheel?  It’s been around for years, but on Windows and Linux I’ll be damned if I’ve had a homogeneous horizontal scrolling experience across multiple applications.