Hi all,
I'm new here, been reading for some time but this is my first post (actually my second, but the first was eaten up by the rollback). I wanted to share my praise for my new Slimblade, which I've been using for the past 10 days or so.
tl;dr: Slimblade has a very smooth motion, and works great on a Mac after playing with the acceleration/speed in TrackballWorks.
Some background: I work in a science research lab, so I mouse around a lot when analyzing data or working with certain less-than-keyboard-friendly software programs. I use a Mac, and prefer wired mice. Up until last month, I used a Microsoft Comfort Mouse 4500. However, I started developing pain in my wrist, to the the point where mousing hurt. I used my Trackman Marble Wheel for a couple of weeks: the pain was less but still there, and had migrated up my hand to my thumb. After reading here and around the internet, I decided to go the "big" trackball route.
The Slimblade, in conjunction with the newer version of Trackballworks, is great. The ball motion is incredibly smooth, and there's enough momentum/inertia that a little bit of gunk on the rollers doesn't slow the ball down that much (compared to my Trackman Marble, which needed to be cleaned daily). The buttons on the Slimblade don't have the best "action" to them, but the programmability is very handy; I have dedicated left, middle, and right clicks, and the fourth button is a browser 'back'. There is the option of mapping a simultaneous press of both bottom or both top buttons to something, but I haven't done that yet as I just don't have a need.One of the nice advantages of any trackball for me is that my button presses don't move the cursor (with my mouse, I tended to move around a bit while pressure the middle button). Since the middle button figures heavily in some of my programs, this is a useful feature for me.
The scrolling action (spinning the ball around the z-axis) took a day to get used to, but now I find it perfect. I scroll with one finger, using the chrome-coloured ring around the ball as a contact point (i.e. I slide my finger around the chrome ring, placing enough pressure on the ball to actuate scrolling). I learned that Mac's will shift to horizontal scrolling with a press of the Shift key (I didn't know that before last week) which makes up for the lack of a horizontal scroll.
TrackballWorks is a full featured program; for my needs, it replaces Steermouse (although TrackballWorks doesn't support mapping of buttons for different programs). I've moved the pointer speed to 5 notches shy of 'Fast' and lowered the acceleration to 4 notches above 'Low' to have an acceleration curve that doesn't drive me mad.
Cheers!
