Chris Curtis dot Org

Have you ever gotten into the driver’s seat of your friend or spouse’s vehicle and felt really out of place?  Maybe you have to click the turn signal towards you like a toggle instead of flipping it out like a switch to turn the brights on.  Or the windshield wipers are on the opposite side of the steering column.  You have to turn your eyes at a slightly different angle to see in the rearview, and they keep habitually landing on the wrong spot.  And don’t get me started about how the seat and pedals feel.

Well I went through (am going through) this with my mouse this week.  I’ve used a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer Optical for about 5 years, as best as I can remember.  When my current one (second purchase) started having problems, here’s why I didn’t buy a new one.

They changed the design, completely.  Ruining the feel I had grown so accustomed to.  The main culprit is their new “tilt” wheel.  The scroll wheel on the current models tilts from side to side to scroll horizontally.  This is bad for three reasons.  First, the extra room causes the left and right buttons to be spaced farther apart.  Second, because with ever increasing desktop resolutions, this has to be the most useless feature ever.  Would have been nice back in 640x480 days, but 1650 pixels generally means I see a horizontal scroll bar maybe once a year.  Lastly, for some reason, they have molded a rigid plastic saddle around the wheel, which is raised from the rest of the mouse.  Oh, and the wheel rolls freely, no little “clicks” to provide any type of tactile feedback.  So four reasons.  At any rate, I bought a different mouse.  At the recommendation of many a review site, and our own Chris Curtis, I purchased a Logitech MX700.

I got it yesterday and it felt like a small rock that I had just picked up out of a stream.  My hand almost wants to rest on it and pretend that every finger falls naturally into the contours on the mouse.  Years and years of separate development paths have made mouse manufacturers come to different conclusions on what finger does what and which fingers rest, and where.  I wouldn’t want to say that MS had it right and Logitech did it wrong....my hand just has five years of muscle memory that have been thrown out the window.  If you ever have to stop and think about which finger to do what on your mouse with, your productivity drops to nil.  I think this is how old people feel when they first use a computer.  My eyes and brain expect things on the screen to happen--regular daily activities that are so mundane they have burrowed very streamlined neural paths in my brain--and my new mouse is throwing up roadblocks, tire spikes, and small mammals to stop the traffic.  They say that people playing Tetris for the first time have massive brain activity, but that people who have played it a lot and are good, have almost no brain activity.  I’m going back to having to have lots of brain activity to do things like open folders, contextual menus, scrolling, etc.

In a desperate attempt to see how others successfully use their Logitech MX700, I just had to ask someone who had streamlined paths for it.  This is how that went:

Well you just did, Chris.  And before anybody says it, yes, the correct plural of mouse as an input device is indeed mouses.

Posted Wednesday January 26, 2005 in Real Life by Derek Jones

This is an older entry and as such, it may be by a guest author or contain formatting problems / extraneous code. If you notice something wrong with the entry, please use the Contact page to let me know the entry title and issue.