And this is why I've been using Thinkpads for the past 17 years. After becoming competent with the Trackpoint, any other laptop input method seems frustratingly slow and prone to unnecessary movements. It is especially well suited for working with Vim and keyboard-heavy workflows where every second you spend with your fingers on the keyboard is a second of productivity.
You can pry the Trackpoint from, cold dead fingers. It's too bad that no other laptop vendor has adopted such a fine and well-designed input interface.
First, its true!, we showed Apple that the trackpoint is at least 20% faster than the trackpad for text editing,,, they said... "yeah but its ibm not apple's branded input device"... apple is still a marketing company
At first the trackpoint catapulted IBM into a new and important market, moving them from not being able to sell even a few thousand laptops a year, to selling billions of dollars of them a year... SO THEY WOULDN'T LET US SELL THE POINTING DEVICE TO ANYONE, EVEN THOUGH THEY WANTED IT... FOR TWO YEARS.
by then their were 5 copycats ... that sucked... sullying the TrackPoint luster... so they let us sell it.... but it was a bit late and the price IBM charged was a bit tough to pay...
still: at least HP, Zenith, TI, SONY, used the real thing for a while
Dell did licence it for some of their machines BUT,,,, they put these really stiff buttons on them that were like 5 times as stiff in the front as in the back... bad buttons can completely negate all productivity gains... Dell was told,,, and i would be happy ... even now ... to help ,,, some have conjectured that Dell put the TrackPoint in to get people to move away from the ThinkPad, and when it didn't work, they would "get used to the pad" and not pay the premium for ThinkPad again...
Right, the interesting story was toshiba, who constantly would come buy to pretend to buy TrackPoints... then try to learn enough to "fix thiers" ... even though I had published much of the secrets, others never made copies that were good enough to matter.
From the beginning, I encouraged people to use mice for constant pointing, and TrackPoint for mixed typing and pointing... one reduction in stress came with the (won over 4 years) introduction of the wrist wrest in the thinkpads of the 770 time frame... notebooks from most companies before that (like the 750, 755, etc) promoted that the notebook should be the size of an A4 piece of paper and that moving the keyboard towards the display was somehow evil... (even though apple had wrist wrests)...
consider using buttons from one hand for buttons and the other for pointing , it helps.
Have you turned up the TrackPoint sensitivity? The default settings are too slow and you have to push it too hard. Note that there are two settings in the Mouse control panel that affect it: the regular mouse sensitivity slider and a separate TrackPoint slider. I keep both of those turned up just a notch or two from the right (most sensitive) and also have "enhance pointer precision" on. With this sensitive response I've never had any RSI or fatigue from using the TrackPoint.
Something else to note here is a long-standing bug in the TrackPoint driver: unless this has been fixed recently, whenever the driver is updated it loses the TrackPoint-specific sensitivity setting. If you ever find the TrackPoint responding more slowly that it should after an update, double-check that setting.
It seems to be a "business" thing, almost all the non-ultrabook laptops I see at work (typically the Precision, Elitebook etc) have a Trackpoint variant. My aging Acer Travelmate has one, but unfortunately it has no middle-button, so scrolling is impossible!
They do different caps, I had similar issues but found the cup shaped one was way better, as your finger fits into the cup slight you have to apply way less downwards force alongside lateral force.
They aren't expensive I think I paid 10 pounds for 8 or something on ebay years ago, they last forever.
the cup shaped one was first developed for a a thumb based handle we made for flight traffic controllers. In those days (1991) we thought a cup in a keyboard would be too big.
Actually the new placement bellow not between the g and h key (long before it was a product) made the space for it... but we were to timid for the big style tops for years. the first ones were a chloroniated butyl that replace the awful protoypes that were slippery santoprene%$&$#,,,, but the very sticky butyl (that saved the product from sure death) were actually formulated by my father as the last consulting gig of his life...
unfortunately they absorbed oil over a few months from fingers ... I tried everything and the bumpy one is nylon trying to mimic the amazingly gripy fish skin we found in Japan... the larger cup and domes of today are better still!
I always thought there should be an aftermarket for designer Trackpoint caps, like Pink Hello Kitty Caps, or Black Spikey Hipster Caps, or Fleshy Famous Porn Star Caps.
I wonder if 3D printers can render the special kind of rubber that Ted's father designed for the trackpad tops?
I remember seeing purple ones at one point, and I don't think any manufacturer used that color as standard, so it must have been an option at some point.
The other vendors' implementations leave much to be desired. Dell and HP have no middle button on the mouse (at least on the models I've used), which makes scrolling a pain.
The middle button was added to placate my obsession with a second pointing device. We showed that you could use the middle button to accomplish what all my two TrackPoint prototypes did... they went for it... but ... i am sorry to say ... the scrolling consistency and control somehow (still) gets hijacked by Windows in some ways ... it should be revisited.
Ah, just looked it up. Some models have it and some don't. I never paid too much attention to them because their small laptops (I prefer the X-series Thinkpads) don't have a pointing stick at all.
yes, I don't know why our friends at Lenovo took it out of their lower priced models and , too, please pester Lenovo, there is still so many ways the TrackPoint can be improved, it is worth the small development effort it would take!
Thanks for coming to HN to speak about this! I think I will probably write a letter to Lenovo regarding the TrackPoint (I've always found that real letters do worlds more than emails).
I'm curious, have you tried any of the Ultranav desktop keyboards with TrackPoints? I'd love to have one on my desktop, but I'm not sure if they work as well as the ones on Thinkpads.
I used a Thinkpad with trackpoint for a couple of years in the late 1990s and found the same thing. Very quick and easy to use, but I never quite found a way to use it that wasn't at least slightly uncomfortable. The main thing I remember was the unpleasant sensation of fingertip moving separately from nail - I have the same problem pushing my fingertips along sticky or grippy surfaces - so I was in the habit of pressing quite hard, to ensure they moved as one. And that proved quite stressful on my fingers.
Eventually the rubber nubbin wore away (probably not unrelated...) and that made it even worse.
These days I've been pretty happy with the Macbook Pro touchpad. Not to all tastes, but I found it easy to get used to, and it requires only a light touch. Pretty much every other touchpad I've used has been pretty crappy, though...
As a longtime Thinkpad user, the MacBook's touchpad is the first one that I've actively liked as opposed to merely tolerated. I almost never bother to use a mouse with my laptop as a result and even have a separate touchpad (in addition to a mouse) for my desktop system.
Also, brilliant for pixel accurate graphics editing. I miss my Thinkpad, and I'll probably go back to them for my next machine.
As much as I love my Surface Pro 2, the Typecover keyboard has the worst touchpad I've ever used. Yes, I'm judging an otherwise brilliant machine by one fault with an optional extra, but it's a pretty big fault, and a recommended extra.
I'm a recently converted, multi-decade, trackpoing evangelist as well. I loved it on my Dell laptop from a decade ago, that I insisted on a ThinkPad when I started my current job. However, that one bit the dust, and modern ThinkPads just aren't up to my modern standards.
I just got a Dell M3800, and, while it doesn't have a trackpoint, it does have one of the finest trackpads I've ever used. Almost as good as a Mac trackpad, and just as good as my Logitech T650.
I use it almost exclusively now, and, after a few weeks to get acclimated, I'm just as productive with it. The proximity to the keyboard is perfect for me. I recommend giving it a shot, if you ever cannot get your hands on a laptop with a trackpoint.
Lenovo's bluetooth keyboard [1] is quite nice if you've gotten used to a pointing stick and want it on your desktop as well.
It's fairly expensive (~80 USD), but it's one of the better chiclet-style keyboards I've tried.
The main drawbacks are imho Fn/Ctrl position (Fn bottom left, cannot be swapped with Ctrl) and a bit poor Bluetooth range.
Strangely, they've also put a huge PrtSc key between AltGr and Ctrl, which is easy to accidentally hit. (The Ubuntu camera sound has occasionally scared the bejeebies out of me.)
Apart from that, I'm really happy with it. There is a Linux utility to lock the Fn keys which works well [2]. It charges via USB (~1 week battery time with high usage), but does not function as a USB keyboard.
There's also the Tex Yoda, for those who are also fans of minimal mechanical keyboards. You have to wait for a group buy on massdrop to buy one, though.
This would have been fun if they'd shipped it and if software could have been written for it. The idea was that each TrackPoint would have its own cursor, so for example in a text editor you could use one for selecting text and the other for menus.
Ted demonstrated that at the NPUC (New Paradigms for Using Computers) workshop that he hosted at IBM Almaden Research Center in the 90's, running on OS/2 at the time.
You're right: "modern" desktop software has no idea how to handle two pointing devices, so the gui and apps would have to be redesigned from the ground up to really take advantage of two trackpoints.
It's a shame it never took off (and that IBM didn't rewrite OS/2 from the ground up to support multiple input devices ;). You can imagine what the multi-trackpoint would be called, given that a single trackpoint is called the "keyboard clit".
This is a great story for people working for an HID startup. The finished product always seems so simple.
I always liked the trackpoint more than trackball, and the ThinkPad always had the best implementation. However, I was introduced to GlidePoint in the early 90's (I still have it, it has a 9 pin serial connector) and have always preferred a full featured trackpad because it allowed for gestures, but as the article demonstrates, people get invested into the device they use and it becomes a (strong) preference.
It gave me the thought to check into the settings for the pen on my Surface and just discovered "flicks". I had no idea the feature existed.
What I mean is that "Flicks" are essentially the same as pie menus, just another name for a particular implementation of pie menus, with its own set of features, limitations, visual feedback, design decisions and trade-offs (like limiting the number of items to 8, which is a sound idea).
So I would argue that Windows has at least two different types of pie menus, including Flicks. (Does IE still support that weird mouse-wheel-press up/down scrolling cookie? There's another!)
Much like many web sites have at least two kinds of linear menus: the stylish HTML popup menus that drop down when you mouse over the header titles, and the native platform dropdown menus that pop up when you mouse down in a select input. [5]
Pie menus can and should support "mouse (or pen, finger, whatever) ahead" and "display pre-emption" so you can operate them with quick flicks, without unnecessary feedback. But they can also optionally provide different kinds of visual feedback including traditional pop-up menu windows [1 @ 4:30], cursor icons [2 @ 4:40], drawing strokes and animated overlays (i.e. pac-man [1 @ 8:35], precision [1 @ 13:12], window management [3 @ 2:08]), and "direct manipulation" real-time in-world continuous feedback (i.e. object rotation tool [2 @ 4:40], font style selection [4 @ 1:55]).
The Sims supports two different kinds of pie menus:
1) The round pop-up menu windows that you get when you right click on an object to select an available action [2 @ 2:12], with a head in the middle, surrounded by text item labels.
2) Also the direct manipulation "object rotation tool" that lets you turn an object around to face four different directions [2 @ 4:40], which uses audio and cursor feedback plus in-world "direct manipulation" feedback by rotating the object itself in real time.
Operationally, the object rotation tool tracks exactly like a four-item pie menu sliced vertically and horizontally, with a small inactive region in the center. But visually it's so obvious what it does that there's no need to pop up a window with labels.
Real time visual feedback previewing the effect of the gesture in the world is the ideal direct visual representation, so if there's a good way to obviously and unambiguously represent the menu actions directly, like applying attribute changes to text [4 @ 1:55], it renders distracting pop-up windows unnecessary (or optional and useful for training).
In 1988, the HyperTIES hypermedia browser [6] supported pie menus with directional flicking gestures and mouse-ahead display pre-emption for paging forward and back (left and right), navigating the history, selecting which window to open a link in, and user defined menus with feedback based on continuous direction and distance (color hue/saturation/brightness [1 @ 10:42], font family/style/size [1 @ 12:14], etc).
>Designing to facilitate browsing: A look back at the Hyperties workstation browser. Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland.
>Pie menus to permit low cognitive load actions:
>To avoid distraction of common operations such as page turning or window selection, pie menus were used to provide gestural input. This rapid technique avoids the annoyance of moving the mouse or the cursor to stationary menu items at the top or bottom of the screen.
>3. PIE MENUS TO PERMIT LOW COGNITIVE LOAD ACTION
>The Hyperties browser uses pie menus as accelerators, to make commonly used commands quickly and easily available. A pie menu is a type of pop up menu whose selections are laid out in a circle around the menu center (18). The menu pops up centered on the cursor, so that each selection is adjacent to the cursor but in a different direction (Figure 1 and 6). A selection is made by moving the cursor in the direction of the desired selection, and clicking. Experienced pie menu users can make selections from familiar menus quickly and reliably without even having to look at the menu, because the menu selection depends on the direction between the two mouse clicks that invoke and select from the menu. The distance of cursor motion does not effect the selection, but the further away from the center the cursor is, the more precise the control of the selection is.
>The browser has a control panel at the bottom of the screen, with buttons showing the names of available commands, to turn the page, return to the previous article, show the index, etc. When users are browsing a document by pointing and clicking on highlighted text links in the main contents window, they move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to press buttons in the control panel, and back up to continue browsing. The permanent display of those controls is important for the novice and occasional users. On the other hand, pop up menus reduce the distraction of moving the cursor by making these commands available wherever the cursor currently is. This reduces perceptual and motor load. Pie menus are arranged with their items in easy to remember directions. For example the BACK page turning commands are to the left (and the NEXT page is to the right) (Figure 6). This arrangement facilitates gestural input and encourages development of muscle memory. Experienced users can make gestural selections from these menus so comfortably and rapidly that it is often unnecessary to display the menu. This is called "mouse ahead display suppression", and its point is to reduce the perceptual distraction.
I recently stopped brining my work MBP home in favour of a second hand lenovo X200. I often find myself reaching for the trackpoint on the MBP, but I never reach for the trackpad on the X200. It's weird how quickly this became the intuitive thing to do.
Ted Selker [1] is the amazing guy who invented and refined the Trackpoint [2] or "Joy Button" as he called it (but IBM refused to call it). He put years of research and development into the product, and I'm happy he's finally written up and published the story. [3]
I'm glad for the chance to share some of the stories he's told me verbally over the years, some of which I wrote up about a year ago, and I will update with links to more fascinating information about his work. [4]
Ted is one of my favorite successful mad scientist inventor heroes, who's created many amazing ideas, and followed through to make them practical products! He's in the same league as Will Wright [5], Trurl and Klapaucius [6], Dr. Emmett Lathrop "Doc" Brown, Ph.D. [7], and Rick and Morty [8].
In 1984 he observed that it took 0.75 - 1.75 seconds to reposition the hand from the keyboard to the mouse, which is a long time for something that you do quite often. `
He tried many different ideas and built several prototypes, then later when he was working at IBM Alameda Research Lab, he had a chance to refine the idea into a product.
He had his father, a material scientist, help by designing the special non-skid rubber that the clitoris was made from.
IBM wouldn't let him ship it until it was measurably as efficient as a mouse for common tasks.
The thing going for it was that it eliminated the 0.75 - 1.75 second hand repositioning penalty, but of course the fundamental problem with it that you can't get around is that it's a relative positioning device, not an absolute positioning device like a mouse. So he had to come up with ways of overcoming that problem.
The trackpoint performs very well for mixed typing and pointing tasks, since you switch between typing and pointing so often, and that adds up to a lot of time, and is a very common way of using computers. The mouse is still better for tasks that are mostly pointing and clicking, but it takes up some prime real-estate on your desk, and there are many situations where a mouse is impossible to use with a laptop.
He also made the observation that when the cursor moved above eye tracking speed, you tended to lose track of it. And also the observation that some of the time you needed to position it finely around a small area, and other times you needed to move it quickly across a large area.
So he came up with a pressure-to-speed "transfer function" that had a non-linear mapping from how hard you were pressing it to how fast the cursor moved.
The mapping had a plateau at "predictable fine positioning speed" (i.e. there was a wide range of light pressure that would map to moving the cursor at one exact slow predictable speed, so you could smoothly cruise the cursor around with a light touch at a speed that was good for exact positioning. Then after the plateau of light pressure, it sloped up smoothly until just below eye tracking speed, where there was another plateau, mapping a wide range of harder pressure to a fast-but-not-so-fast-that-you-lose-track-of-it speed, for coarse positioning without losing the cursor. And then above that there was a fast speed for quickly flicking the cursor to the other side of the screen.
They did lots of user studies and took lots of measurements and performed lots of experiments to determine the best parameters for the pressure-to-speed transfer function, and finally came up with one that was measurably good enough to make IBM happy and ship in products.
So after pooh-pooh-ing the name "Joy Button", IBM finally settled on and trademarked the name "Trackpoint." But one concession they made, was when they published a two page ad spread in Time Magazine with a close-up of the trackpoint, above the slogan "So hot, we had to make it red!"
Another crazy but brilliant innovation he developed was the Thinkpad 755CV [9] that you could remove the back of the LCD screen and lay it down on an overhead projector to project the video! Nobody probably remembers overhead projectors any more, but they were very popular at the time, and that feature could save you a lot of money, and you never had to reboot it three times just to get the video on the projector, like with modern laptops!
He also made a prototype Thinkpad with TWO hot red trackpoints on the keyboard, which invitingly resembled a pair of nipples. It was very popular with everyone he tested it on, but unfortunately OS/2 had no idea how to cope with two pointing devices, so there wasn't much use for it, besides being a wonderful ice breaker at parties.
I don't know if his lab is the one that invented the butterfly keyboard, but it was another in a long line of wonderful innovative ideas that were coming out of IBM's research labs and showing up in the Thinkpad at the time.
I learned about this stuff from the talks and demos he gave at his NPUC - New Paradigms for Using Computers [10] workshop that he produced at IBM Alameda Research Labs. [11] -- it was a really great free workshop, including free lunch, with people like Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy!
1995 IBM NPUC Augment and Bootstrap Institute (July 27, 1995), with Ashok Chandra (IBM), Ted Selker (IBM), Marvin Minsky (MIT), Terry Winnograd (Stanford), Henry Lieberman (MIT), David Kelly (IDEO) , Douglass Engelbart (Bootstrap Institute), Nolan Bushnell (Atari), James Gosling (Sun), Marc Davis (Interval Research), Ramana Rao (Xerox PARC), Steve Mann, Thad Starner (MIT). [14]
NPCU talks by Don Hopkins and Don Norman, discussing how well intentioned user interface designs can unintentionally enable users to easily destroy cities and cause nuclear meltdowns. [19]
How We Create Power Supply _ From Compilation 1 [20], in which Ted Selker explains why and how his group designed new kinds of power supplies, and focuses on their design approach of doing lots of competing designs at once and comparing them.
Once I was sitting in a coffee shop in Mountain View hacking on my Thinkpad, and Ted and his wife Ellen rolled in, sat down, and started chatting. Ted noticed that my Thinkpad's Joy Button was all worn down, and he was mortified and quickly excused himself to go out to the car. Ellen rolled her eyes and shrugged, explaining that he was always like that. Then he came back with a big bag of red Joy Buttons, and replaced my worn-out one right there in the coffee shop, and gave me a few extras as spares!
He's a brilliant inventor, and a really nice guy, who apparently always carries around a big bag of spare Joy Buttons in case anybody needs one.
Thanks for the remarkable post - one question, "the fundamental problem with it that you can't get around is that it's a relative positioning device, not an absolute positioning device like a mouse." - it seems to me that touchpads, mice, and trackpoint nubs are all relative positioning devices. The only input devices that I can think of that are absolute would be a touch-display or digitizer.
What I meant was that some input devices are "more relative" than others, i.e. second derivative, pressure controlling velocity, instead of movement controlling position. With pressure controlling velocity, you're one more level removed from what you actually want to control, which is position. But that level of abstraction does have its benefits, like avoiding the "nulling problem" that makes context switching more difficult.
And in particular, the huge advantages the trackpad benefits from, which overcome the costs of being "more relative", is that it's in a small fixed location, and that location is right where your hands already are, minimizing the (enormous and frequently repeated) cost of switching between pointing and typing tasks (0.75 - 1.75 seconds).
Since the trackpad controls velocity, you can press it for as long as you want to move the cursor as far as you want in one direction. But with a mouse or trackpad that controls position, you eventually have to lift your mouse or finger and recenter (nulling it) when you hit the edge of the desk or trackpad.
Simply taking your finger off of the trackpoint stops moving (nulling it), while a joystick requires a spring to return it to the center (nulling it) to make it stop moving when you take your hand off of it.
>Isotonic joysticks are handle sticks where the user can freely change the position of the stick, with more or less constant force. Joystick. Analog stick.
>Isometric joysticks – where the user controls the stick by varying the amount of force they push with, and the position of the stick remains more or less constant. Isometric joysticks are often cited as more difficult to use due to the lack of tactile feedback provided by an actual moving joystick.
>Pointing stick: A pointing stick is a pressure-sensitive small nub used like a joystick. It is usually found on laptops embedded between the 'G', 'H', and 'B' keys. It operates by sensing the force applied by the user. The corresponding "mouse" buttons are commonly placed just below the spacebar. It is also found on mice and some desktop keyboards.
Bill Buxton wrote an insightful and classic paper (one of my favorite of his many great papers) called "Lexical and Pragmatic Considerations of Input Structures" that explains what I'm getting at.
It's well worth reading the whole paper (it's short and accessible), but here's the relevant stuff:
Check out "Figure 1: Taxonomy of Input Devices", with the vertical axis labeled "Property Sensed: Position, Motion, Pressure (Sensing Mechanism, Touch Sensitive)", and the horizontal axis labeled "Number of Dimensions (1, 2, 3)".
>Caption: Continuous manual input devices are categorized. The first order categorization is property sensed (rows) and number of dimensions (columns). Subrows distinguish between devices that have a mechanical intermediary (such as a stylus) between the hand and the sensing mechanism (indicated by "M"), and those which are touch sensitive (indicated by "T"). Subcolumns distinguish devices that use comparable motor control for their operation.
>[Discussion...] Before leaving the topic of the tableau, it is worth commenting on why a primary criterion for grouping devices was whether they were sensitive to position, motion or pressure. The reason is that what is sensed has a very strong effect on the nature of the dialogues that the system can support with any degree of fluency. As an example, let us compare how the user interface of an instrumentation console can be affected by the choice of whether motion or position sensitive transducers are used. For such consoles, one design philosophy follows the traditional model that for every function there should be a device. One of the rationales behind this approach is to avoid the use of "modes" which result when a single device must serve for more than one function. Another philosophy takes the point of view that the number of devices required in a console need only be in the order of the control bandwidth of the human operator. Here, the rationale is that careful design can minimize the "mode" problem, and that the resulting simple consoles are more cost-effective and less prone to breakdown (since they have fewer devices).
>One consequence of the second philosophy is that the same transducer must be made to control different functions, or parameters, at different times. This context switching introduces something known as the nulling problem. The point which we are going to make is that this problem can be completely avoided if the transducer in question is motion rather than position sensitive. Let us see why.
>Imagine that you have a sliding potentiometer which controls parameter A. Both the potentiometer and the parameter are at their minimum values. You then raise A to its maximum value by pushing up the position of the potentiometer's handle. You now want to change the value of parameter B. Before you can do so using the same potentiometer, the handle of the potentiometer must be repositioned to a position corresponding to the current value of parameter B. The necessity of having to perform this normalizing function is the nulling problem.
>Contrast the difficulty of performing the above interaction using a position-sensitive device with the ease of doing so using one which senses motion. If a thumb-wheel or a treadmill-like device was used, the moment that the transducer is connected to the parameter it can be used to "push" the value up or "pull" it down. Furthermore, the same transducer can be used to simultaneously change the value of a group of parameters, all of whose instantaneous values are different.
If the Trackpoint can be called the "Joy Button", then this patented invention of Ted's can only be called the "Joy Button Frobulator".
I imagine that somewhere deep in Lenovo's labs there are a few refrigerated shipping containers from IBM full of these contraptions, working hard all day and night, poking and tweaking and twiddling and twisting hundreds of Trackpoints, making a dynamo hum like so many centrifuges applying rotation in a secret lab.
Assembly suitable for life testing a multi-dimensional force transducer
>US 5544530 A
ABSTRACT
A test assembly suitable for life testing a computer pointing stick includes a rigid shaft that is rotated by a motor and a mounting mechanism for holding and positioning the pointing stick under test in a coaxial relationship with the rigid shaft. A cantilever spring arm is rigidly connected at one end to the rigid shaft so that it rotates with the rigid shaft and is mechanically coupled under lateral spring tension at its other end to the pointing stick. The spring rotates with the rigid shaft and applies lateral force to the pointing stick via a collar attached to the pointing stick, the direction of the applied force rotating with the rigid shaft and cantilever spring. A counter records the cumulative number of flexure cycles required to make the pointing stick functionally fail.
Weighing in at an astounding 37, Ted Selker wins the award for Most Uses of the Phrase "Rigid Shaft" in a Patent!
This. My first laptop (a Toshiba something or other) had a trackpoint, and I've been a fan ever since.
People at work get quite frustrated trying to use my laptop as I disable the track pad.
The only other device that has come close, in my opinion, is the MBP track pad, and even that loses the benefit of not having to move your hands from the home row on your keyboard.
I love how he was able to just continue to develop and invent/improve things. Was he intentionally skipping out on tons on intervening politics and pleading, or was IBM really just that amazing?
This made me more sad than ever that IBM sold to Lenovo. I feel none of that kind of quality or intelligence behind the products now.
It pissed Ted off that other cheap knockoff laptops aped his trackpoint design without getting it right, which gave it a bad reputation: they were missing the crucial patented pressure => speed transfer function, which had a plateau at fine predictable positioning speed, a smooth slope to another faster plateau within eye tracking speed, and then a high quick movement peak.
At the time, IBM was making CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) PowerPC Thinkpads, which nobody could think of anything to do with because all they did was run OS/2, when everybody actually wanted them to run MacOS (but IBM refused to admit that was a good idea). That would have been the best of both worlds, back when Apple and IBM were in bed together (i.e. Kaleida, Taligent).
I finally got the irony of this old joke after working a few years at Kaleida, a joint venture of Apple and IBM. It was like having dysfunctional parents who were forever fighting with each other, but staying together for the sake of the children.
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?
A: IBM.
At Kaleida, I gave a ScriptX demo to Lou Gerstner that involved throwing a bouncing eyeball around the screen for navigating and controlling the application, but he wasn't very impressed by the practical applications. After the demo, I realized I must have used the wrong eyeball.
What good is it having a right brain and a left brain, if they don't talk to each other?
UTF-8 interpreted as ISO-8859-1/Windows-1252 and then encoded back into UTF-8. Probably came from a copy/paste of material in a different encoding, via a program that was not charset-aware.
I have never got past the problems he describes with overshoot and finger pressure and sluggish motion combined, holding tension on my finger feels unpleasant.
I hear the new square Blackberry has the keyboard itself double as the touch sensitive trackpad. I haven't tried it, but that instantly sounds nice - like the inverse of a touchscreen keyboard, if you will.
Do any of you know of a desktop or laptop keyboard where the keys - F and J particularly - work as trackpads?
I saw a CHI video demo of Ted Selker demonstrating a keyboard joystick key years ago... Ted tried and evaluated a lot of different designs before perfecting the trackpoint!
Some of his videos I linked to above might show some early prototypes.
Looks like using the key itself as a joystick is mentioned in this patent:
>The above objects are attained by providing a generally rectangular shaped sensor assembly, including a plurality of sensors, which may be placed either directly underneath an existing key of a data entry device or in between two keys of a data entry device. When the sensor assembly is placed underneath an existing key, the key is used as the analog pointing device. When the sensor assembly is placed in between two keys, a separate joystick is used as the analog pointing device.
Here's a paper that Barrett, Selker, Rutledge and Olyha wrote about "Negative Inertia": using a dynamic force => velocity transfer function to make the trackpoint seem snappier: smoother yet less sluggish.
Negative Inertia: A Dynamic Pointing Function
R. C. Barrett, E. J. Selker, J. D. Rutledge, R. S. Olyha, IBM Almaden Research Center.
>In-keyboard isometric joysticks can give better performance than mice for mixed typing/pointing tasks. The continuing challenge is to improve such devices to the point that they are preferable even for pure pointing tasks. Previous work has improved joystick performance by considering user perception and motor skills. This paper considers the dynamics of the pointing operation. A dynamic transfer function for an isometric joystick is described which amplifies changes in the applied force to increase responsiveness without loss of control. User tests show a 7.8 +/- 3.5% performance improvement over a standard non-dynamic joystick. This feature has been incorporated into the TrackPoint III from IBM.
>[...] Figure 1 [gif file missing] illustrates the effect of the negative inertia filter. The user applies an increasing force to begin a motion, holds constant while cruising, and then reduces the force to stop. The filter causes the motion to start and stop more rapidly while not changing the cruising rate. The velocity may actually become negative at the end of the motion causing the cursor to "back up" slightly. This response causes the cursor to be more responsive without loss of control.
And this parent describes the Trackpoints special force => velocity transfer function:
Method of controlling the velocity of a cursor of a video screen
US 5764219 A
>Input force applied on a pointing device (51) having outputs (x,y) is related to the velocity of a cursor on a video screen according to a transfer function (FIG. 2) substantially described by a parabolic sigmoid function, thus resulting in adapting the force/velocity relationship to accommodate human perception and motor control limitations and task specific coordination problems.
I love the idea of not having to take your hands away from the keyboard, but not having used a trackpoint for any extended period of time am worried about whether sustained use will cause any sort of pain.
Could anyone comment on this? I've been thinking of getting an ergonomic mouse already but this seems like an interesting option since it'll save desk space as well.
I've had TrackPoint (and clone) laptops for the past 13 years, starting with my laptop I had for college (a Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046) and now a ThinkPad T-410.
The TrackPoint-clone on the Fujitsu definitely gave me pain in my right index finger—pain that lingers, I believe, to this day. I ended up switching to an external mouse because of it. However, that pointer was small and required a lot of force (even at the highest sensitivity).
Since I still have lingering pain from the Fujitsu, I still find myself using the TrackPoint on my ThinkPad less than I otherwise probably would, and I rarely use it with my right index finger. However, I've noticed no further ill effects. The combination of touchpad and TrackPoint is actually really nice—I often find myself scrolling with the touchpad with my right hand while my left hand is moving the cursor with the TrackPoint.
I use a trackball on my desk—not only does it save space, but I've definitely noticed a reduction in wrist pain since I began using it.
TrackPoint user of 10 years here. I used to get repetitive strain in my right hand/wrist, mostly from reaching for the mouse. I switched both my laptop and desktop to TrackPoint keyboards and have been pain-free ever since. Less-crowded desk too.
Honestly, if you're a heavy programmer/writer, the TrackPoint is such a superior choice ... having to move your hand off the keyboard all the time is inefficient and kills flow!
Also, TrackPoints are fantastic for reading web pages. Scrolling is very intuitive and almost motionless - just hold the middle button with your thumb while applying a bit of down pressure on the stick.
n.b. Not all pointing stick are created equally! I've used HPs and Dells - both are inferior to TrackPoints, and I wouldn't recommend them. (kinda like how Apple trackpads are superior to the competition.)
For a short while some mobile devices sported a optical "trackball". Basically a small square that did with your finger what an optical mouse do with a desk surface.
I have sometimes wondered if it would work to embed such a device in the same position as one find the trackpoint.
You can pry the Trackpoint from, cold dead fingers. It's too bad that no other laptop vendor has adopted such a fine and well-designed input interface.