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From: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel)
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: Re: Mac Turbo Touch / Speed Key vs. Mice
Message-ID: <257@oakhill.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Dec-84 10:14:06 EST
Article-I.D.: oakhill.257
Posted: Tue Dec  4 10:14:06 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Dec-84 06:41:40 EST
References: 
Reply-To: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel)
Organization: Motorola Inc. Austin, Tx
Lines: 32
Summary: 

In article <2359@uw-beaver> info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) writes:
>From: Christopher A Kent 
>I hadn't seen this ad till today, and it is indeed intriguing.
>Particularly the claim of "reduc[ing] the time it takes to edit a
>document by 40%". I'd be very curious to know how this was measured.
>I've always found it more difficult to position trackballs, and
>certainly it's harder to move along a single axis.
>
>Unfortunately, Card, Moran and Newell didn't ever publish measurements
>of trackballs when they were comparing input devices. I wonder if they
>did any work with them, or just considered them inferior...
>
>chris
>----------

I visited a customer in the Midwest which was trying to do Macintosh-like
things on a trackball.  The Boss was forcing the developers (hardware and
software alike) to go the trackball route because previous machines
already implemented them.  The results was a total catastrophy (according
to them.)

However, it would be interesting if thru software smarts there were several
levels of speed depending on precise intervals of rotation of the ball.
The major complaint voiced was that it took too many rolls to move the cursor
to the other end of the screen. (Note the Mac has an option in the control
panel to skip every other pixel if the speed of the mouse goes above a
certain limit.)

It would be interesting to hear of anyone elses experiences.

Motorola Semiconductor                           Dave Trissel
Austin, Texas                                    32-Bit Applications Engineer