TidBITS: USB Mice

Article 1 of 2 in series

15 Nov 1999 | Print

Pointing the Way with USB Mice, Part 1

The iMac introduced Universal Serial Bus (USB) technology to the Macintosh line - along with a puck-like USB mouse that's become a frequent target of criticismShow full article

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The iMac introduced Universal Serial Bus (USB) technology to the Macintosh line - along with a puck-like USB mouse that's become a frequent target of criticism. The iMac also marked the disappearance of the trusty Apple Desktop Bus (ADB), so third-party mice and input devices wouldn't work with an iMac without add-on converters. Apple's push toward USB ubiquity - combined with the iMac's considerable popularity - has caused pointing device manufacturers to release a flood of USB pointing devices for the Macintosh, all designed to stand in for Apple's default USB rodent.

I've had the good fortune to be privy to the development phases of several USB mice and to witness the maneuvering of driver development. Sorting through the sizable collection of pointing devices here in my office and making a few acquisitions yields a cross-section of all of the major offerings.

Catching Mice of All Sizes -- With mice, size and shape matter. The mouse, in many ways, personalizes the user's computing experience. Given the number of hours that professionals spend at their computers, the mouse must be conducive to good work habits and promote healthy wrist positions. There is likely a user for every mouse shape and size, and only you can decide which mouse shape and size are best for you, based on your individual anatomy and work habits. Fortunately, CompUSA, BestBuy, and similar venues have updated their sales displays to include demo mice that users can try for size and feel. Still, I've bought and put in my closet more mice than I care to count.

Currently, most high-end USB mice have similar feature sets. Multiple-button devices reign. Scroll wheels have mushroomed in popularity. Ultimately, though, the mouse driver is what provides the fluidity of workflow and user interface that make up the user experience. These drivers, where the real magic occurs, can be evaluated with some degree of objectivity.

My company, samespace, is a consulting firm that specializes in marketing and business development. As a result, we use our Macs for a variety of common tasks from email and Web browsing to graphic design and page layout. This creates a grueling test track for input devices that also offers a varied application environment in which to test the custom mouse drivers that are bundled with today's USB devices.

UniMouse... Original or Extra Crispy -- When Contour Designs first introduced the UniMouse, they led the market with a three-button replacement for the iMac puck. It's a mouse of solid design that's a bit beefy, something that many users love. I never could use it comfortably, but my wife loves hers, oddly enough, given that her hands are significantly smaller than mine.

However, the driver software that shipped with the original UniMouse was awful. It required you to place a custom extension in the System Folder, but offered no configuration options. Changing button settings required you to replace the Contour extension with another pre-programmed one. You set mouse speed via the Mac OS's Mouse control panel.

Since then, the UniMouse has evolved to include UniMouse Overdrive, a customized version of Alessandro Levi Montalcini's USB Overdrive that gives the user far more control over individual key definitions and unifies the mouse speed setting to the same control panel. UniMouse Overdrive works well, though its user interface is arcane, suffering the same eccentricities of the shareware version of USB Overdrive (discussed in part 2 of this article). The mouse buttons are now fully customizable. We configured our iMac for a click from the left button; the right button Control-clicks to bring up contextual menus, and the middle button calls up a household favorite application switcher. For those who prefer scrolling, UniMouse Overdrive supports an auto-scroll function that works in most applications. Additionally, UniMouse Overdrive supports application specific sets, enabling the user to define mouse functions unique to where they are most needed. Overall, UniMouse Overdrive is simple, clean, and workable, but mostly a huge improvement over Contour's original effort.

<http://www.contourdesign.com/unimouse.htm>

Kensington MouseWorks... Mostly -- Kensington Technology Group has updated their venerable MouseWorks software to include support for USB devices. I've now tested it with both their Orbit trackballs and a USB scrolling mouse. Kensington has just released a spate of new devices, including two new scrolling mice and a multi-button trackball that should perform similarly.

MouseWorks behaves as expected when configuring the buttons or ballistics curves for the pointing device. Ballistic curves change the rate at which the mouse responds to movements (for instance, the mouse can be set to move further based on faster motions), thus providing the finest degree of control offered by any driver reviewed.

For those who need more buttons than their physical device provides, MouseWorks supports chording of the mouse buttons, enabling the user to define buttons clicked together as though they were a single additional mouse button. Also, MouseWorks provides a cursor that snaps to the default button of dialog boxes, along with several other functions that improve pointing precision on large displays or at high cursor speeds.

MouseWorks offers numerous configuration options, including support for both scroll wheels and scrolling with mouse movement. Wheel-based scrolling support in MouseWorks 5.3 is vastly superior to the previous version of the software. With the previous release, some applications didn't scroll at all. The latest release fixes this, resulting in consistent scrolling in most applications. You can now adjust scrolling speed, but I found that even on the fastest setting scrolling continued to feel sluggish. This sluggish scrolling combines with Kensington's ample buffer to make overscrolling (a condition where the window keeps scrolling well after the wheel has stopped) a common occurrence. Also, scrolling works exclusively on windows that lie beneath the cursor, which can be inconvenient on large displays since it forces the user to point at the window they wish to scroll.

Support for application specific sets is excellent. Kensington has developed this functionality through the previous generations of MouseWorks. The current iteration allows for fluid application changes without unexpected hiccups. Application sets work well enough that users can enforce similar interfaces upon disparate applications by using the extra mouse buttons as simple macros.

<http://www.kensington.com/products/pro_ c1018.html>

More Mice Everywhere -- In part two of this article, I'll cover the rest of the litter of USB mice and drivers, including Logitech's MouseWare, the XLR8 Point-and-Scroll mouse, Microsoft's IntelliPoint, and USB's ubermaus driver, USB Overdrive.

[Warren Magnus is the brains behind samespace, a marketing and business development consulting firm. He also serves as sponsorship chair and webmaster for the MacHack software developers' conference.]

<http://www.samespace.com/>

Article 2 of 2 in series

22 Nov 1999 | Print

Pointing the Way with USB Mice, Part 2

by Warren Magnus

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Apple's introduction of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) to the Macintosh line and the addition of the puck-like mouse bundled with iMacs and Power Macintosh systems have prompted developers to create replacement pointing devices. Just as important as the plastics of each device, however, are the USB drivers that power them. In part one of this article, I talked about Contour Designs' UniMouse and Kensington's family of mice. Here, I want to wrap up with Logitech's MouseWare, XLR8's Pointer to make do with a single cadre of button definitions. This is adequate for my purposes, but it simply won't suffice for the true customization junky.

Wheel scrolling works fairly well in applications that recognize the MouseWare driver. For instance, Internet Explorer consistently responds to the scroll wheel and behaves as expected; Sherlock does not. Logitech makes note of this incompatibility but has yet to announce a fix.

An added bonus is that MouseWare supports horizontal scrolling and defaults to horizontal if no vertical scrolling is available in the active window. Scrolling is also cursor-focused, so scrolling takes place in the window beneath the cursor, which is useful for applications like Ircle that have multiple windows and floaters. This subtle nicety does behave a bit oddly in framed browser windows, where it scrolls the closest scroll bar, which might not be what you want.

I enjoyed the capability to scroll in two dimensions while working in FreeHand and Word; this feature almost justifies a Logitech mouse and MouseWare combination by itself. For those who prefer a more consistent user experience though, the lack of scrolling support in Sherlock and undoubtedly some other applications may eliminate Logitech's MouseWare driver from consideration.

<http://www.logitech.com/us/support/ mouseimac.html>

XLR8 Point-and-Scroll... and Nothing Else -- Dirt-cheap PC peripheral maker Interex has entered the USB mouse game on the Mac side with the XLR8 Point-and-Scroll mouse, a sub-$20 two-button mouse with a scroll wheel that's available in a variety of colors.

The XLR8 Point-and-Scroll control panel is simple and clean, in part because it offers limited functionality. The control panel provides two tabbed panes, one for defining functions for the buttons and another for configuring the scroll wheel. No application specific sets are available.

Once activated, scrolling is where XLR8's driver shines. Holding down the Option key while moving the scroll wheel enables horizontal scrolling. The driver also supports what it calls "accelerated scrolling." Once activated, scrolling is continuous and scrolling speed increases the farther the wheel is moved. For users looking for a cheap mouse with a scroll wheel, the XLR8 mouse may be the perfect choice.

<http://www.xlr8.com/point&scroll/>

Microsoft IntelliPoint... A Smarter Mouse -- A cursory examination of the Microsoft IntelliPoint mouse driver reveals tightly tuned controls. Microsoft did a nice job of integrating all of the functionality into three tabbed panes. IntelliPoint includes the common "snap-to" feature that automatically moves the cursor to the default button in dialog boxes./P>

IntelliPoint has one undocumented feature that's quite useful - accelerated scrolling that changes the scrolling distance based on the speed at which you rotate the wheel. Move the wheel one notch a time, slowly, and you'll scroll a single line a time. Give the wheel a quick turn, and you'll scroll an entire page at a time.

IntelliPoint works with all the different Microsoft USB-based pointing devices, including the Microsoft IntelliMouse (the classic Microsoft mouse), and the new IntelliMouse Explorer, Redmond's new chrome multi-button monster with a red tail-light. I found the feel of the buttons and scroll wheel on the IntelliMouse Explorer to be light and strangely dainty given the rat-like size of the beast, but many will love the light touch and Microsoft's maintenance-free IntelliEye design that eliminates the crud-gathering mouse ball in favor of an optical sensor.

<http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouse/>

USB Overdrive... Difficult to Drive -- Alessandro Levi Montalcini's $20 shareware USB Overdrive is the uberdriver for all sorts of USB-based pointing devices. It works with both mice and joysticks, and once configured, works very well, offering consistent, reliable behavior. Scrolling is reliable and ubiquitous. Horizontal scrolling suffers the same liabilities as the IntelliPoint driver and just isn't as handy as it should be. USB Overdrive also supports application-specific configuration sets.

Despite USB Overdrive's excellent feature set and reliability, its user interface is compressed and inelegant, with mouse speeds using arcane descriptors like Fast 20 and Medium 80. Since USB Overdrive supports all known types of USB pointing devices, it displays the entire set of controls it knows about, including those that don't exist on devices you have connected. This results in a confusing array of controls, and because there's no way to determine the names of these controls from the ROMs in the pointing devices, USB Overdrive assigns them arbitrary names that don't always make sense. In addition, controls are held to a single window which, while busy, makes it easier keep track of settings and trace down unexpected mouse and button behavior.

Revisions to InputSprockets with Mac OS 9 created some problems for gaming devices (not mice) controlled by USB Overdrive that Alessandro is working with Apple to resolve. Some users will find it necessary to disable USB Overdrive's joystick support (by removing the USB Joystick Overdrive extension from the Extensions folder, then unplugging and replugging the USB device) to facilitate game play with InputSprocket games.

That said, USB Overdrive is the ideal solution for any USB pointing device that would otherwise go unsupported on the Mac and might be worthwhile for Logitech mouse users who desire more reliable scrolling.

<http://www.usboverdrive.com/>

Finding Your Hole in the Wall -- Ultimately, a pointing device buying decision becomes a compromise between physical design and driver limitations.

Thanks to its clean interface and bulletproof scrolling, Microsoft's IntelliPoint driver helps the Microsoft pointing devices stand out in a crowded and contentious field. The lack of a traditional mouse ball helps the IntelliEye mice scroll smoothly regardless of surface (including your leg or a pillow), although early reports noted problems with certain specific surfaces (such as glass and other reflective surfaces) that I have been unable to reproduce.

For those who wish to avoid Redmond's answer, the extensive configuration options provided by Kensington's MouseWorks makes a Kensington USB pointing device a good second choice. Scrolling support in MouseWorks is less robust than in IntelliPoint, but the variety of pointing devices available from Kensington may compensate for this limitation.

<http://www.samespace.com/>

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Series: USB Mice

Pointing the Way with USB Mice, Part 1

Pointing the Way with USB Mice, Part 2