Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
This is a PowerMate by night:
As if that made anything clearer.
Apart from the fact that it glows.
In fact the PowerMate is probably the neatest combination of uniqueness and usefulness I've ever seen in an input device. Griffin, the manufacturer, itself uses this fact in its marketing (just click the external and you'll see). The PowerMate looks like a good old-fashioned stereo volume knob with a USB connector and a nice blue light in its base. And by default it also works exactly like one. Install drivers, plug in, turn knob. Hear the computer's volume increase and decrease, and watch the blue light change strength accordingly. Click to mute sound, click again to unmute it. Soothing.
But the really good part is that the PowerMate's fully programmable, both globally for the system and for individual applications. As long as a command has a keyboard shortcut it can be assigned to the PowerMate. Turning the knob while it's pressed counts as different action too (as does pressing and holding the button, as one of my ever-attentive readers reminds me), so you can actually get five different commands mapped to the PowerMate in each and every applicaion you can think of. I mainly use mine for scrolling, as that comes kind of natural, and in Safari the click opens a new tab and clicking and turning at the same time goes back and forth in the page history.
And it's fully AppleScriptable too (if you connect it to a Mac, that is. Otherwise it works the same in the Windows world too). Mine currently flashes the LED when I have new email, just for example.
Any downsides? Well, I find it easy to make a click by mistake when I try to do a click-and-turn. Could be me, could be construction/software. A second thing is really a software feature request: I'd really like to be able to make the PowerMate perform a right-click/option click (pick your label preference). You can assign a standard click, so why no right-click?
And the USB cable is a little short. Designed to be connected to one of a desktop Mac's two keyboard-located USB ports, it's long enough to put the PoweMate on the opposite side of a 12 inch PowerBook, but there isn't much slack. Plugging it in on the back of a standard PC box is out of the question without extension measures (an extension cable is included though).
3/8 2004
I've now been a PowerMate owner for a while longer, and I have to say it's proving more useful and convenient than I may have thought at first. After all, I'm mainly a laptop user, and nobody wants too many gadgets connected to their laptop, right? But thanks to its sturdy construction the PowerMate is a very nice thing to have connected. When browsing websites I can sit back with the PowerMate in hand and scroll through long pages with my thumb in a very nice fashion. Holding a mouse in your hand/lap just doesn't feel as nice, plus there's normally more cable to be concerned with (so I see a new point with the short standard cable). Interesting and radical scripting ideas still to arrive though ...
When I noted a long time ago (and a few paragraphs up) that the PowerMate is AppleScriptable, what I meant was that you can easily tell scripts to do things with it. Well, yesterday I thought it'd be nice to have the big old button play/pause iTunes when pressed and realized it's actually a little bit less elegant to have the PowerMate run an AppleScript when an action is performed. What I needed to do was save the script as an application, then tell the PowerMate to "open file" and hand it the application. Which works but feels kind of clunky when the script icon pops up in the dock, bounces a bit and then disappears again. There has to be a more elegant way ...