Love for the Nipple

Despite the incessant noise emitting from the fan of my T43 with which I am currently typing this blog entry, I have been an avid fan of IBM Thinkpads. For those of you who have used Thinkpad notebooks before, there is this little red ‘nipple’ as I like to call it embedded in the middle of the keyboard, between the ‘G’ and ‘H’ keys. Some people hate it. I love it. In fact, I’ve grown so accustomed to it now that I find trackpads rather difficult to use. This ‘nipple’ is part of IBM’s mouse replacement TrackPoint system. In addition to the little red ball, the system includes three other buttons directly below the spacebar. The left and right [red] buttons are typical of any other mouse equivalent but there is also a blue button positioned in between them.

The ‘nipple’ acts as an extension of your hand. Pushing it left and right shifts the cursor horizontally and pushing it up and down shifts the cursor vertically. The speed at which the cursor moves depends on the amount of pressure that is applied. The harder you push, the faster the cursor travels. When combined with the middle button [by pushing both simultaneously], it becomes a pressure sensitive scrolling mouse wheel. Unlike typical mouse wheels with invariable scrolling speeds [not counting Logitech’s MX Revolution], this combination allows users to fly through large documents and inspect pages line by line with the same controls.

This design allows for greater efficiency. You can go from typing to pointing, scrolling, and selecting with negligible hand movement. Your fingers never stray away from their typing positions and your palms stay planted along the bottom ridge of your laptop keyboard. To point and scroll all I have to do is shift my index finger off the ‘J’ button onto the red ball and my thumbs off the spacebar onto the left and middle buttons. With trackpads you must move your entire hand down before sweeping your finger across the pad. If you wish to move from one end of the screen to the other with a trackpad it would require multiple swiping motions. Also, there is no mouse acceleration as you would find with the TrackPoint system.

This design, however, is not without flaws. When an individual first uses the track ball there is a slight learning curve as with any other input device. He or she must adapt to the sensitivity and mouse acceleration or adjust the cursor settings accordingly. It is not as intuitive as a trackpad – if you draw an ‘S’ on the trackpad, the cursor moves in an ‘S’ like fashion. There is also a problem with ‘cursor drift’ in which the computer registers cursor movement when the track ball is left untouched. Furthermore, there are no foreseeable equivalents to some of the multi-touch features of the trackpad.