| Jef wanted a trackball instead of a mouse. The claim that he did not want a pointing device is false. That would have made little difference for a Mackintosh user. The hardware of a trackball is exactly equivalent with that of a mouse, neither is simpler than the other. (Optical mice without rolling balls have appeared only decades later.) I have actually used trackballs instead of mice for a few years, and I have greatly preferred them to mice or touchpads. Trackballs tend to be slower than mice, because you normally move them with the thumb or with the fingers, instead of moving the entire hand, but they are usually more comfortable than mice. Nowadays, since several years ago, I use as the graphic pointing devices small graphic tablets configured in the relative mode instead of their default absolute mode. These are greatly superior from all points of view, speed, accuracy, comfort, to both mice and trackballs and to any other kinds of pointing devices, like trackpoints or touchpads. So Jef Raskin had good reasons to question which is the best graphic pointing device, instead of just accepting the mouse because that happened to be the choice made at Xerox. Based on my experience on how much better a stylus is than any kind of mouse, I consider the use of mice for pointing devices as a great historical mistake in the use of computers. I deeply regret that I have used mice for decades, instead of trying to find something better since the beginning. The Apple Mackintosh is a significant culprit for the undeserved popularity of mice. |