Back in the bad ol' days of the early '90s, a friend loaned me a Kensington trackball (the "Turbo Mouse ADB"). It appeared to be having an incompatibility problem with his system, causing frequent crashes. I set it up without a problem on my Mac SE and was soon as comfortable with it as I was working with a mouse. As someone with arthritis, I thought the trackball would be a better device for me, saving a lot of arm and wrist movement. But after a month or so working with it, I switched back to a mouse. The trackball was just too darn big (and remains so). It was the size of a small package of frozen vegetables with a billiard-sized ball in the middle. It was too much for my wrist to bend up to rest on the ball and the ball was too large to fit comfortably in my hand. I was sold on the idea of the trackball, but not on the design. Given this history, I was encouraged by the pre-press on the Orbit trackball and immediately called up Kensington to request an evaluation copy.  The Orbit is a handsome cross between a mouse and a trackball. The teardrop-shaped unit is molded to fit comfortably in the hand with the index finger resting on the left button, the middle finger assigned to the nav duties on the ball and the ring finger working the right button. The ball itself is a translucent blue orb--very sexy when it picks up the light just right. The Orbit, like all Kensington mice and trackballs, comes with the excellent MouseWorks software. MouseWorks lets you assign functions to the left and right buttons and both buttons together (called chording). You can also assign application-specific sets of button functions. The program comes with a number of these pre-sets for things like MS Word, QuarkXPress and Navigator. Kensington also plans to offer others (via their Web site?). Both Mac and Windows versions of MouseWorks offer platform-specific features. For Windows, there's an auto-scroll which will automatically scroll through a document when one of the buttons is depressed (very handy on things like Navigator). There's also a cursor visibility tool that lets you choose the size of the cursor and to locate the cursor should you loose track of it onscreen. On the Mac side there's a Menu Lock which works like the Windows menu: as you click on a menu, it stays open 'til you click on an option (or another menu). I found this very handy when navigating hierarchical menus. An application menu gives you a pop-up menu of currently-open applications that you can switch between. There's also Windows mimicking the functionality of two-button PC mouse operation for those running SoftWindows or other Windows emulators. While MouseWorks is cool and goes a long way towards making the Orbit trackball a better device, it comes with all Kensington input devices, so it's not really a factor in evaluating the Orbit. On its own, I have to pass. Maybe it's just because of my arthritis, but I found even its streamlined design to be too large for real comfort. The top of the ball is almost 1 3/4" off the surface of the desk (as opposed to my mouse which is less than an inch). This height difference bends my wrist just enough to be a bad fit. I also find clicking and dragging harder with a trackball and no amount of fiddling with the cursor settings in MouseWorks seemed to fix that. The chording option is nice, but I found it hard to use in some applications (like setting it to click and drag). I suspect different people will have different comfort and use requirements and that the Orbit will do the trick for some of them. Obviously lots of people are using the larger trackballs already so this is definitely an improvement. And, if you've been wanting to try a trackball but have found the previous models too chunky, the Orbit may be worth a look. I would recommend trying someone else's first (or one in a store) to see if it's right for you. I think it's back to the ol' rodent-on-a-rope for me. A few other things to note: * An adapter comes with the PC version which lets you plug into a 9-pin serial port or a PS/2-style mouse port. * At least one review of the Orbit said that the ball does not come out of the housing. This isn't true. To clean "the ball cage," all you have to do is pop out the ball by depressing a tab underneath. Then you clean it just like a mouse. * One of the things I love about MouseWorks is a work time reminder. After you've been working for a specified interval of time, a customizable alert (text, audio or both) tells you to get off your sorry ass and do some stretching (at least that's what mine tells me to do). * The Orbit Kensington sent for my PC was dead within a week (they later sent me one for my Mac which has been working fine). If I'd paid for the device, it would have been a real drag to have installed it, had it break, and then needed to call to get it replaced, wait for it to arrive, etc. - Gareth Branwyn [7/8/97]
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