Install kensington trackballworks portable#
Install kensington trackballworks software#
Install kensington trackballworks mac#

That said, I also find scrolling to be jumpy on my ExpertMouse, so this may just be a “Kensington thing.” (What I wouldn’t give for an ExpertMouse with the smooth-as-butter scrolling of Logitech’s higher-end mice.)

Install kensington trackballworks software#

And scrolling itself was jumpy unless I slowed the scrolling speed using Kensington’s software (see below). (For me, it was easiest to drop my middle finger down off the ball to scroll.) Out of habit, I frequently tried to use roughly the same amount of pressure that I’d use on my MacBook Air’s trackpad, but when I did so, the gestures occasionally weren’t recognized-or at least they weren’t recognized for the entire duration of the gesture. When you want to scroll, you drag a finger up or down on one of these pads. Rather than a traditional mouse-style scroll wheel, or the mechanical scroll ring of the ExpertMouse, the Orbit Mobile features two touch-sensitive, arc-shaped pads-one curved around the left side of the ball, and the other on the right. The Orbit Mobile’s scrolling feature, on the other hand, I sometimes found frustrating. For cursor control and clicking, the Orbit Mobile is a very good device, and one that I, as a weight-obsessed traveler, found worth packing in my bag. The buttons are large and easy to press, even with your pinky (though not so easy that you end up pressing them accidentally), and the symmetrical design means the trackball is equally usable by righties and lefties. The left and right sides of the Orbit Mobile are tapered, letting your thumb and pinky fall naturally on the left and right mouse buttons, respectively. The ball’s optical-tracking movement is smooth and, depending on your settings, surprisingly precise-the Orbit Mobile’s tracking isn’t as good as that of the ExpertMouse, but it’s much more responsive than Kensington’s SlimBlade Trackball. The crease where your palm meets your fingers rests on the top of Orbit’s body, with your index and middle fingers resting gently on the ball. The Orbit Mobile’s shape is a comfortable curve, with the 1.2-inch ball located on the downward slope, almost flush with the front edge. And at 5.4 ounces, it isn’t much heavier than a travel mouse.

Install kensington trackballworks portable#

Larger than a typical portable mouse, at 4.2 inches long, 3.3 inches wide, and 1.6 inches thick at each dimension’s largest point, the Orbit Mobile is nevertheless significantly smaller than Kensington’s full-size trackballs and small enough to fit comfortably in most laptop bags. Kensington’s Orbit Wireless Mobile Trackball is the first portable trackball I’ve found that’s good enough to earn a place in my laptop bag, though it’s not without its drawbacks (which, interestingly, have nothing to do with the actual ball). But the best trackballs are too big for portable use, and every mobile trackball I’ve tried has been at best disappointing, thanks to cheap construction and inferior hardware, and at worst an ergonomic nightmare, thanks to a too-small trackball or a design that forces you to use your thumb to roll the ball.

Trackball fans, unfortunately, have never had a good option for portable “mousing,” despite the fact that a trackball is, in theory, an ideal portable accessory: It can be used on almost any surface, and it needs only as much space as the base of the device itself. In fact, the Magic Trackpad is a great accessory for MacBook owners who like trackpads, because it gives you a larger, more-ergonomically placeable device that’s still easy to pack in your bag. I also appreciate the ergonomic benefits of using an external pointing device with a laptop-as good as Apple’s trackpads are, they’re still located in the middle of the laptop below the keyboard, requiring an unnatural hand position. For me, a large trackball is both better ergonomically than a mouse or trackpad and, because it doesn’t need space for moving around, a more efficient use of desk space than a mouse.

Install kensington trackballworks mac#

Even today, on a Mac running gesture-heavy Lion (Mac OS X 10.7), I use Apple’s Magic Trackpad ( ) along with a trackball (now a Kensington ExpertMouse)-the trackball for moving the cursor and clicking, the trackpad for gestures. I started using a Kensington TurboMouse back in the early 1990s as a remedy for a mouse-induced repetitive-stress issue, and I’ve never looked back.