Both a mouse and trackpoint are directional tools. Neither one provides absolute positioning (as a touch screen or graphics tablet does). They’re both relative, in that they indicate the direction to move the pointer. The difference is that the amount of a mouse’s movement translates into an amount of pointer movement, while a trackpoint’s movement translates into the velocity of pointer movement.
The Big Loser is the eraserhead. It ONLY conveys direction, which abstracts the user an additional degree from what is almost always intended: Position. It's not just less useful, it is impossible to configure an eraserhead to operate in any kind of positional mode. All of the other input devices can be dumbed down to act like an eraserhead (if desired), but an eraserhead cannot be configured to act like the others. It is a fundamental failure of the design.
I do respect those who really love their eraserheads. It's a small niche market group but they do exist and my hat is off to them, being able to achieve some measure of usefulness from such a fundamentally limited device.
Try to rake leaves behind or between bushes or in between bushes and fence, or sweep leaves with a broom from the driveway. Leaf blowers have their application, but often people buy shitty models that are only good to blow 0201 resistors from the PCB. Seems your neighbour did not get the right tool.
Otherwise I just leave the leaves where they fall and let nature take care of it, it doesn't bother me to have leaves on the ground and I see little point in blowing them around from one place to another.
Both a mouse and trackpoint are directional tools. Neither one provides absolute positioning (as a touch screen or graphics tablet does). They’re both relative, in that they indicate the direction to move the pointer. The difference is that the amount of a mouse’s movement translates into an amount of pointer movement, while a trackpoint’s movement translates into the velocity of pointer movement.I slightly disagree. Most OS's and mouse drivers allow you to choose the acceleration rate, including zero, and zero makes the mouse absolute. Likewise tablets can have nonzero acceleration rates. Even touchscreens can have acceleration - "flick" a scrollable screen and it will often continue to scroll after your finger has left the surface. Trackballs are another reasonable choice, which work like an upside down mouse with all of the same configuration options. Even a traditional joystick (with ratiometric output, not just bang-bangs) can work positionally, even absolute position.
Apple puts a lot of effort into the design of their products but I wouldn't make the assumption that just because Apple doesn't do something it's not a good idea. For all the good design choices they make there are a lot of bone-headed decisions too. Ditching all the ports and going with only USB-C, the awful butterfly keyboard, the glued in non-user-replaceable battery, that ridiculous notch in the iPhone and newest Macbook screens, the useless and annoying touchbar, the ridiculous round mouse on the original iMacs, the list goes on.
All of this is why I led with "slightly disagree".
My points were from the perspective of the user. My work in HID's always started with that. If you keep the focus on the user experience and don't worry so much about the technical specifics, the limitations of the eraserhead surface early and don't go away. Some users are able to achieve remarkable results with them, but they remain fundamentally limited because of everything I wrote above.
Case in point: Yes, if you lift and move the mouse it doesn't "know" it has moved. But if you move the mouse, the cursor moves in an intuitive manner related to the mouse movement. Not true for the eraserhead, which may estimate your intentions using some of all of 1) direction of tilt, 2) force applied, 3) rate of force application (aka acceleration!), 4) duration of force application, and 5) rate of force release (deceleration, or negative acceleration), and 6) area under the resulting curve. We experimented with all of those. That's why eraserhead proponents impress me, that's a lot of variables to skillfully control with a single finger.
I'm not an Apple fanboi (I can't think of a single Apple product I own) but they spend a LOT of money doing a LOT of research into human factors design trying to make "the computer for the rest of them". They have the money to make anything they want. Yet I've never seen an eraserhead on any Mac or MacBook. Apple was fast to adopt the mouse, but since the 80's they've apparently never found the eraserhead to be superior to a mouse or a trackpad. Just another data point.
This is another case of "Glad there's so many different options to choose from". Buy what you prefer, I do!
Apple puts a lot of effort into the design of their products but I wouldn't make the assumption that just because Apple doesn't do something it's not a good idea. For all the good design choices they make there are a lot of bone-headed decisions too. Ditching all the ports and going with only USB-C, the awful butterfly keyboard, the glued in non-user-replaceable battery, that ridiculous notch in the iPhone and newest Macbook screens, the useless and annoying touchbar, the ridiculous round mouse on the original iMacs, the list goes on.100% agree on every point. You do not need to convince me that Apple ain't perfect! I swear their OS and overall user interface is designed on some foreign planet by aliens. Everything is different than I would logically expect it to be. I'm amazed at their ability to be so consistently opposite to my expectations. To be clear: Opposite as in different, not necessarily "wrong" or "broken".
If the surface matters that much, I'm surprised we don't see more emphasis on cleaning those surfaces. I'd think accumulated grime, skin oils and cells, particulates, etc. would overwhelm modest texture differences rather fast. I got out of the HID business before touchpads got that picky.
Try to rake leaves behind or between bushes or in between bushes and fence, or sweep leaves with a broom from the driveway. Leaf blowers have their application, but often people buy shitty models that are only good to blow 0201 resistors from the PCB. Seems your neighbour did not get the right tool.
I have a cordless electric one that I use to blow leaves off my roof and out of the gutters, occasionally I'll also blow off the walkway up to the front door and the driveway since it's steeply sloped and a slipping hazard. Otherwise I just leave the leaves where they fall and let nature take care of it, it doesn't bother me to have leaves on the ground and I see little point in blowing them around from one place to another.
Try to rake leaves behind or between bushes or in between bushes and fence, or sweep leaves with a broom from the driveway. Leaf blowers have their application, but often people buy shitty models that are only good to blow 0201 resistors from the PCB. Seems your neighbour did not get the right tool.
I have a cordless electric one that I use to blow leaves off my roof and out of the gutters, occasionally I'll also blow off the walkway up to the front door and the driveway since it's steeply sloped and a slipping hazard. Otherwise I just leave the leaves where they fall and let nature take care of it, it doesn't bother me to have leaves on the ground and I see little point in blowing them around from one place to another.
I just leave them, wind blows them away eventually, any that are left just decompose, good for nature. Some people seem to be obsessed with neat and tidy!!!
I know, controlling 3D motion with a 2D input device is not trivial. But it doesn’t need to be brain-dead.
I know, controlling 3D motion with a 2D input device is not trivial. But it doesn’t need to be brain-dead.Please, please tell me they're not using Euler or Tait-Bryan angles for the rotation. (It is one of my pet peeves I described here recently.)
If dragging horizontally rotates the view around the vertical axis, and dragging vertically around the horizontal axis, and rotating one 180° causes the other to be mirrored (can happen with only one of the axes, depends on the Euler/Tait-Bryan model used), they are.
Anyone writing such code should beshotseverely scolded, and forced to do a few weeks of tier-1 user support via phone as a penance.
It's not like the intuitive virtual trackballs are any more difficult to implement, you just use versors/bivectors for tracking the core orientation.
One thing I've found indispensable on a laptop is a Fn keystroke to disable the trackpad. Otherwise on many machines it picks up the heel of your hand and suddenly the cursor is "somewhere else".
The Euler angles are used in classical mechanics to discuss the rotation, nutation, and precession of a rotating solid body.
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/EulerAngles.html
Each of those processes (for example, in a child's toy top) is the evolution of one of the three Euler angles.
I haven't seen them used in computer-graphic interfaces, but that's not my field.
One thing I've found indispensable on a laptop is a Fn keystroke to disable the trackpad. Otherwise on many machines it picks up the heel of your hand and suddenly the cursor is "somewhere else".I beg your pardon. Language, please!
One thing I've found indispensable on a laptop is a Fn keystroke to disable the trackpad. Otherwise on many machines it picks up the heel of your hand and suddenly the cursor is "somewhere else".I beg your pardon. Language, please!What? It's the name of the effin key. Oh. Oooh.