I used to love the Amiga, but the mouse definitely wasn't something I loved about it. This brought back memories of me smashing mine against the desk in frustration.
Yeah, likewise - I remember getting a very sore thenar* from those hard corners after the sort of stupidly-prolonged gaming sessions teenagers are capable of. Then I got a Naksha, which was borderline-futuristic.
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* base of the thumb. I had to look it up, I'm not going to pretend I knew that.
Yup but back then they still used a ball. And that ball was always filthy and both the ball and the rest required regular cleaning (just as with other old mice).
Yeah, that ball was definitely the thing that caused me to smash it against the desk. I also have vague memories of the almost meditative process of regularly cleaning the wheels. Swings and roundabouts.
Awesome; happy it exists; can't imagine using it - we've learned so much about ergonomics last couple of decades!
Personal preference as well - I prefer a scrolling wheel with fairly distinct, discrete detentes that allow me to precisely choose how much scrolling (or assigned function) is happening.
I've got a band-aid on my middle finger due to my cat disagreeing about when to stop touching the belly. I can barely feel my laptop keys with it on, but I can still feel enough of of the detents in my mouse's scroll wheel!
Do you think some kind of haptic feedback on a touch-scroll would make the difference for most people? I still don't think so.
My gut instinct was "No", but honestly? I've experienced vibrating haptic feedback work WAY better than I thought physically possible, so "Maybe"?
Personally I did not enjoy the Logitech mice with configurable detentes on the wheel, as they always felt wobbly. But I can conceivably envision a configurable sensitivity of touchpad to enable discrete scroll and haptic feedback that is accurate and useful. Not sure if there's a large enough market of course.
A lot of Valve's hardware (Steam controller, Steam deck, VR controllers) has heavy haptic feedback on its touchpads, including when scrolling, and it makes much more of a positive difference than I expected it would.
Is the touchpad going to be a good alternative to a scroll wheel? My NVidea Shield remotes use a touchpad for the volume, and it's "just okay." Every time I adjust the volume on my TV it feels like I'm doing something naughty to the remote.
I really like the mice that have a clutch button that lets you unlock the wheel for free scrolling. It helps for scrolling through long documents. I feel like a touchpad scroll wheel doesn't really change the finger motions. Unless, they do something clever like where you drag your finger down and hold it at the bottom for constant autoscrolling. They could adjust the speed of the autoscroll based on how fast your finger moved.
I wouldn’t want to be without a notched scroll wheel (for discrete scrolling steps), something which can’t be replicated by a touchpad.
Also, the rocking motion and cogwheel-like touch of the finger on a scroll wheel feels nicer and more controlled to me than the sliding motion and friction on a touchpad.
I've been working on one for a while now. I'll hopefully get a writeup posted soon. However, I can't see it ever being available for $40 like the Tank Mouse... the 3 switches alone cost $12, and the Pixart sensor is $13 unless I manage to find a cheaper source.
The ergonomics of the original Amiga mouse wasn't too bad - not great, but not bad either. My gripe with it was how noisy it was, and that the buttons often began exhibiting numbness after just a few years of use.
