© 1996 Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 18, no. 2, March-April 1996, pp. 29-31.
Once upon a time long, long, long ago, Apple invented the mouse.1 Sadly for me, I don’t like mouses.2 Yes, I’ve had a Mac since 1984, and yes, it came with a mouse, and yes, I like my Mac. But Apple made a mistake when it added the mouse.
If you see someone who has room for a mouse on their desk, you see someone who probably has other silly traits as well. Desks are for holding books, papers, pens, cans of Coke, computers and peripherals. Clearing space for a mechanical rodent race track is extravagant in the extreme, an unforgivable waste of our planet’s limited resources.3
Alps has created the ultimate space saver: the GlidePoint. Taking up about a third as much space as a mouse, and about one fiftieth the space of a mouse pad, the GlidePoint is essentially a small, thin, flat square attached by a thin cord to the ADB4 port of a Mac. If you’ve ever seen a PowerBook 190, 520, 540, or 5300, imagine the built-in trackpad removed and stuck on a cord; that’s a GlidePoint (see Figure 1).
Like a Power Book trackpad, you operate the GlidePoint by running a finger across the surface. There are no moving parts, no rollers to gum up with dust and grime, and no mouse ball to get coated with unidentifiable gunk.5 The mouse button has been replaced with three buttons on a GlidePoint, one at the top and two at the bottom, which can be used just like a regular mouse button for clicking, or for click-drag operations, or (with optional programming) for custom operations, such as closing opening or closing a window (see Figure 1).
“If you see someone who has room for a mouse on their desk, you see someone who probably has other silly traits as well. Desks are for holding books, papers, pens, cans of Coke, computers and peripherals. Clearing space for a mechanical rodent race track is extravagant in the extreme, an unforgivable waste of our planet’s limited resources.”
The similarities with PowerBook trackpads may not be coincidental. Unconfirmed rumors6 claim that Power Book trackpads are actually manufactured by Alps for Apple. In any case, the enthusiastic acceptance of the trackpad on new Power Books, and the desire of non-PowerBook owners to have something similar, led Alps to market the GlidePoint.
While it hasn’t been a wild success, it is a definite improvement over a mouse. You never have to pretend it is an all-terrain vehicle and run it over stacks of desktop debris in order to pull-down menus, you never run off the table while trying to avoid evil spaceships threatening to blast you into photons, and it never acts like a stroke victim, able to move only up and down or side to side. You may find this hard to believe, but I’ve never suffered from “heavy mouse syndrome” while using a GlidePoint.7
Alps includes a Control Panel which allows you to adjust the sensitivity and speed of the GlidePoint. You can set it so that, with just a quick twitch on the surface of the GlidePoint, the pointer will go from one edge of the screen to the other. You can also set it so that the GlidePoint will respond to just the barest suggestion of a touch of a finger, or to a more normal “clumsy oaf” default.
If you’ve ever seen a Mac novice try to use a mouse pointing the wrong way, you’ll appreciate another feature: you can change the GlidePoint’s orientation.8 Want the two buttons at the bottom to be at the top? No problem. Rather they were on the side? No problem. Aside from seeing if this feature actually works (it does), I left it set at factory defaults.
Use and Abuse
In actual use, I can sum up my feelings for the GlidePoint in just a few words: I like it better than a mouse. It is a delight having something that never has to be cleaned, and takes up almost no space. It is so small and light that you can stick the entire thing, including the cord, into an envelope and mail it back to the manufacturer if, speaking hypothetically, one of your coworkers were to accidentally run over it with a chair.9
On the other hand, I didn’t care for most of the programmable options. I quickly reset all the special functions of the three buttons to act the same way: a single click means a single click, and nothing more. The high sensitivity setting proved to be too high; there were times the pointer jumped around on the screen when I just thought about moving. One special feature, allowing a double tap on the GlidePoint surface to be interpreted as a mouse click, seemed to be the product of a sick mind: after ten years of mentally separating the act of moving the pointer from the act of clicking, my brain went “sproing” when I tried to do both with just one finger. I turned this off.10
The tiny size and weight of the GlidePoint is also a potential problem. On hot, humid days, the moisture on my fingertip was enough to cause the GlidePoint to stick to my finger just a wee bit so that, instead of pushing the pointer around on the screen, I pushed the GlidePoint around on my desk. This was easy to overcome, but mildly annoying.
One unexpected bonus: the GlidePoint makes a great security device. If I attached it to the left of my keyboard (I’m left-handed), I discovered that a) my coworkers didn’t like using any left-handed pointing device and b) failed to recognize that the GlidePoint was a pointing device. One thoughtful person even left a Postlt stuck to my monitor saying they wanted to use my computer, but someone apparently stole my mouse.
The GlidePoint is also perfect for magic tricks. To demonstrate a program, I once crowded everyone into a small room and, resting the GlidePoint on the side of the monitor, went through the various menus and options. Everyone looked puzzled and, when I asked why, they asked “How are you moving the mouse?” Nobody had noticed the GlidePoint, pinned by a finger to the side of the monitor. I cheerfully informed them that they’d just witnessed a demonstr ation of a forthcoming telepathic interface. They were dubious, but never did catch on to what was really happening.
A More Perfect Rodent
My favorite pointing device is the CoStar Stingray, a petite trackball roughly six times the size of a GlidePoint. I have finer control with the Stingray, and the larger size has definite advantages when you are drawing. On the other hand, it gets gummed up, just like a mouse.11
The GlidePoint comes in a close second to the Stingray. It never gets gummed up. Fine control is somewhat more difficult, but the difficulty is more a function of the tiny size than the technology. Alps apparently is aware of this, and in recent months has advertised a new, “desktop” GlidePoint with a larger, presumably heavier base. I haven’t had a chance to try this new model.
In third place is the Kensington Turbo Mouse, which is actually a trackball. The high profile of the Kensington trackball is a definite minus, but otherwise it is a fine product.
In fourth place, the Apple Desktop Bus Mouse II. If you have to use a mouse, this is a good one. As proof, try the last place entry:
Any mouse used with Microsoft Windows. Mac users are spoiled by the consistent, fluid movement of the pointer across the screen. Windows users, in contrast, assume the mouse pointer is supposed to jump and twitch.12
If and when you break or wear out your mouse, don’t get another rodent. Alps has a much better alternative.
Alps GlidePoint, approx. $60
Alps Electric, Inc.
3553 North First Street
San Jose, CA 95134
(408) 432-6000
1 Actually, Xerox invented the mouse but, like many things that Xerox invented (aside from copy machines), it never went anywhere while in Xerox’s hands.
2 Second annoying historical aside: the plural of computer mouse is mouses. Yes, the plural of the warm-blooded mammal mouse is mice, but while the computer industry has quite a few rats, it has no mice.
3 If there are 23 million Macs in the world, and each one of them needs one square foot of space for a mouse pad (using the more conservative Congressional Budget Office figures), that comes to one square mile of the world’s surface. At Tokyo land prices, that comes to $15 billion in wasted land.
4 Apple Desktop Bus. On all Macs since the introduction of the Macintosh SE, the ADB port is the “one size fits all” port on the back of a Mac for connecting keyboards, mouses, trackballs, joysticks, scanners, and most other input devices. Someone claimed that the ADB port was actually introduced on the Apple IIGS, but it would take genuine research to verify this claim; therefore, it will be ignored.
5 A friend who works for a medical research firm did an analysis of the gunk removed when they cleaned the inside of their Apple Desktop Bus Mouse II for the first time, after about three years of use. They found coffee, Coke, lots of flecks of dead human skin, chocolate chip cookie crumbs, cat hair, human hair, cigarette ash, and “organic material of undetermined origin.” The friend does not drink coffee or Coke, does not have a cat, does not smoke, and is almost totally bald. They do have a fondness for chocolate chip cookies.
6 Unconfirmed rumors are a computer industry standard. Confirmed rumors are called software updates.
7 First discovered by NASA scientists working on the Galileo probe to Jupiter, “heavy mouse syndrome” occurs when you attempt to reach some portion of the screen with your mouse pointer but, no matter how hard you push, the pointer moves either very slowly or not at all. I’ve seen adults break into a sweat straining to move the ”heavy mouse” against the pull of these titanic gravitational forces.
8 There’s an obvious pun here, but you’ll have to discover it on your own.
9 No mouse was harmed in this accident. A pity.
10 However the programmable buttons are invaluable in certain arcade games: press one button to blast the beasties, another to raise your shields, a third to jump into hyperspace. All this plus rapid maneuvering control, in a space smaller than a diskette label.
11 No great surprise; a trackball is essentially a mouse turned upside down. Unlike a mouse, however, the trackball stays in one place, and the place is much, much smaller than a mouse pad.
12 One of the most tormented souls I’ve ever seen was a graphics artist hired by a company to illustrate a magazine – using a Windows machine. After battling the mouse for four weeks, the artist left the $70,000 per year job for their old, Mac-based $50,000 per year job. “I thought I’d like the big money, but it was driving me crazy. Everything I drew looked like bad Picasso.”