Apologies to Tina Turner for rearranging the words of her song “Rolling on a river”
I have used trackballs rather than mice for the last number of years to suit a multi screen (6 way) setup with Input Director controlling 3 machines. This gives me the ability to manage and monitor multiple systems whilst also retaining extra processing power. Recently my trusty microsoft trackball (backup to the original) model started to be less than accurate. My colleagues begged me to switch to another mouse or trackball but I couldn’t find one that suited. I soldiered on with a good wireless mouse that I normally used with a laptop. However scrolling just was not the same.
So I went on a mission to get a replacement pointing device and took my 6 year old daughter to look at the choices available. The response to some of the devices on show was “What kind of mouse is that” – and this reflected the fact that the traditional mouse or pointing device has become rarer with more unusual design available.
Since scrolling was the main concern I looked at the devices in terms of their functionality for the task and finally settled on a wired Kensington Trackball with scroll ring. A wireless one would probably have been icing on the cake. Initial testing on a windows 7 laptop with a variety of common apps I use (Sketchup 8) being one of them confirmed that it was much better at some of the tasks I do repeatedly. The ability to reprogram pressing both right and left buttons to do a screen capture with Snagit was just another benefit. The cost of the device was £20 which means it is a cost effective option rather than the higher costs dedicated cad / creative devices out there. So on the rating on 0 -100 – the Kensington scores a heathy 85.