Date: 2009-01-18 16:30:59 Created: null
These were a nice but oh-so-easy-to-wear-out gang of mice. The buttons would wear out and get unresponsive in seemingly no time at all, it felt like having a slightly worn mouse was the norm, rather than a well-functioning one. People tell me the repair process was very easy, but that didn't help when you had no idea about it :-) ... So, Amiga mice are connected with a bit of frustration, but there's a larger bit of nostalgia to make up for that :-) ...
The next appearance of mice in the house was in the shape of the mouse for dad's old Mac LCII. It's small and square and single-buttoned and doesn't look very special. It has a nice click to it tough. However, after a while you start noticing a difference from the Amiga peripherals.
It lasts. And lasts. And ... well, you get it. By now the rest of that computer actually feels more worn than the mouse, and it's been a few years now ...
My first experience with Logitech mice came when dad brought this one home after the cheap, no-name mouse that came with our P133 failed us. Not only was this one in a whole different dimension of durability, it also had something very special. A third button! Boy, what would those people think of next? I don't think I used it much at first, but then I set the middle mouse button to act as double click. I was hooked. From then on, mice with only two buttons started seeming a little outdated and slow, and I always longed for the quick tap of the middle button to solve all my double-clicking problems in one swift move.
Dad's next computer investment brought further convenience into our lives by having a wheel. Not only did it do the old double click trick, the wheel scrolled windows for you as well! Suddenly it became pretty hard to live without a wheel, and if there wasn't a third button either panic would be near :-) ... Over time this mouse developed some kind of problem with the wheel though, it became harder and harder to scroll with it, and easier and easier to accidentally click when trying to do said scrolling. So, basically it started as a wheel mouse and ended as a three-button mouse. A mouse button has yet to fail me since the days of Amiga mice ...
I got this with my first own PC, and spending a few extra crowns getting a wheel instead of three buttons was an easy choice. The scrolling was a wonder of smoothness compared to the aging MS mouse above. The double-click-on-wheel-click-assignment was immediately made, and everything seemed great. However, after a while I started noticing an increasing number of games making use of the middle mouse button, uses that wouldn't work if it was assigned a special function. So, in a rare step back, the double-click had to go in favour of increased game functionality somewhere around the end of 2000. Apart from this I haven't had a single problem with this mouse that hasn't been resolved by some proper cleaning. Still, better things lured just around the corner. Optical mice, meaning no need to ever clean them or have them wear out. Force feedback mice that didn't require to be mounted on their surface. Optical mice with force feedback was getting tempting ...
Yay, a force feedback mouse! Optical as well, and not much more pricey from it either. And of course it has the now required wheel. So naturally I couldn't resist it. And of course the force feedback is a pretty unnecessary gadget without much practical use. I had it on for a long time in Windows, but then turning it off suddenly made everything feel much smoother and nicer to your hand :-) ... After I got my Intellimouse the iFeel has been moved to Pigbox where the force feedback has no driver suppport, so nowadays it's just serving faithfully as a normal wheel mouse.
Force feedback in games was pretty fun, and could have been even more so if more games had supported it well. Black and White did it really well, but apart from that the support was pretty bare. One of the last things I tried the iFeel with was Serious Sam, the Second Encounter, and that was cool! Chainsaw and force feedback are a wonderful match! Then I switched it off to be able to play properly, the classic mouse wheel problem, which was a pity in this case.
Sometimes I wish the feedback effects were stronger, but then I realize my hand probably wouldn't be too happy about it in the long run.
This is the real luxury liner of my mouse collection so far. Wheel, optical with even more precision, comfortably large and rounded and with a whole heap of easily configurable buttons. It would be cool if it did force feedback of course, but I don't really miss it. The extra buttons pretty much kill any thoughts about plugging in the iFeel before they even have a chance of appearing in my mind.
Touchpads have a certain style to them, but it sure isn't as if I prefer them to normal mice other than as a contribution to the nice compactness of laptops. That said, that contribution is a pretty big thing to me, so on a laptop I can be found using the touchpad instead of an external mouse and rather liking. It just saves a bunch of hand movement and a lot of space, and I think having an external mouse (not to mention a keyboard) kind of goes against the whole idea of laptops. Small, compact and stylish, that's it. But of course, precision and speed suddenly become whole different matters. It's not as if a touchpad (at least not when I'm using it) can even begin to measure up to a decent mouse.
Addition on June 30, 2002
One more thing: having the pad set to click on tap is pretty much a requirement as well. Another one of those things that you can't live comfortfably without once you've started using them. I tried on the iBook, thinking that maybe it caused more false clicks than it was worth. I soon realized the error of this dark side of thought and turned back to the light.
It happened. I ended up with a wireless Apple mouse.
And a keyboard.
Connected to my laptop.
So now I have a one-buttoned, battery-reliant, wheel-less mouse connected to my laptop. Pretty much goes against everything I've written on this page before. It's not like I have a whole lot of good reason either, most of it is probably just Apple's nice design screwing with my mind. I am a weak, weak person ... More on its own page.
Yep, time for another Microsoft mouse ... More on its own page ...