My interest in ergonomic hardware was triggered in the late 1990s when I contracted a bout of tendonitis while writing up my PhD, working full time as a Research Assistant and starting out with publicspace.net concurrently.

Nothing focuses the attention more than pain and the prospect of ending your IT career before it’s even started. I made a lot of changes both to how I work and the environment that I create for myself to work in. In those years, “human factors” were beginning to become a big thing and the awareness of Repetitive Strain Injuries (RSI) was rapidly growing.

Back then, I learned to type using the dvorak keyboard layout, got myself a “proper” ergonomic keyboard (Kinesis Advantage), dabbled in voice recognition (a lot of my thesis was dictated into Dragon NaturallySpeaking) and tried pretty much every pointing device out there.. settling finally on the FingerWorks iGesturePad which has become the grand daddy of the iPhone (and as rumors have it the iTablet/ iSlate, etc.).

Since the late 90s, while ergonomic design has entered the main stream, there have been few ergonomic products of particular note and the companies specializing in such gear seem to have fallen on hard times. RSI, while it hasn’t gone away, has gone out of fashion.

It was in that context that when I came across the “Ortho Mouse” I jumped at the opportunity to test one. Here was a product that seemed to break the mould of computer mice and promised some real health advantages.

The “unboxing” of a new piece of kit has become a bit of a review ritual these days. With Apple’s products this is of course usually a special treat. You feel like you’re getting a boutique item presented to you and even companies such as Wacom have started doing a nice job.

Ergonomic gear usually falls flat on its face in this department. Usually it comes straight from its Chinese factory cardboard box filled with little “chips”. In a word, the experience is more “organic food produce” than “Cartier watch”.

The OrthoMouse doesn’t come in a cardboard box but in a nice looking but much maligned “rigid plastic clamshell” package. I usually hate those things because it’s impossible to get the product out of it without cutting yourself somehow which kind of is the point given that it is first and foremost used as an anti-theft device. Luckily, the OrthoMouse doesn’t fail at this first ergonomic hurdle. The packaging is only held in place by the pressure on its rim and comes open very easily without having to apply more than a gentle push. So don’t open it with box cutters, knifes or scissors!

Just in case, you do come across more “traditional” clamshell packages, here are some safety tips for opening such packages (try the can opener technique).

The packaging itself is quite nice, not up to Apple standards, but it does a good job of explaining the main benefits of the product, looks good and it even let’s you put your hand on the mouse to get a “feel” for it before buying it.

Once opened the package contains the mouse, several plastic shells that can be used to adapt the mouse to your hand size and form along with a mini-CD that contains the documentation and some instructional videos. There are three plastic “prolongers” for small, medium and large hands and two “upper adapters”. I’ve got small hands, so I put on the small prolonger and that seemed quite nice already (I like “puck” style mice anyway).

Connecting the mouse to your Mac is as simple as attaching it to the nearest USB port and the default settings are just fine.

My first impressions were very positive. The mouse fits well into my hand and it rests in the typical “vertical mouse” relaxed neutral position with zero tension in your hand.

With “normal” mice (Mighty Mouse, Magic Mouse, Microsoft mouse, Mac “puck”, etc, etc.) the palm of your hand lies pretty much flat or “horizontally” on the mouse. This seems intuitive until you try a “vertical” mouse where your hand is the “handshake” position.

This position is much more comfortable to work in and leaves your forearm and wrist in a neutral position avoiding much of the discomfiture that often ends up in tendonitis and carpal tunnel injury.

What is noticeable to a long term vertical mouse user is that the OrthoMouse isn’t fully “vertical”. Meaning you have to rotate your forearm a little bit towards the body after all. This intrigued me at first but a quick look through the manual revealed that the grip mimics the traditional hand writing position where the thumb and the index finger hold the pen in a pincer position. I can’t vouch for whether this is better than the “vertical” position advocated by vertical mice, but it certainly feels “right” and gives you a feeling of precision that is sometimes absent in vertical mice.

The next thing that is noticeable is that there is no scroll wheel or little trackball, etc.. instead the OrthoMouse uses two micro-switches on the side of the mouse that you activate by moving your thumb up and down. Moving your thumb up will scroll upwards, moving it down will scroll down. The scrolling continues until you release the switch by moving your thumb back into the middle. The desired speed is selected through the number of clicks: clicking once and holding will result in a very slow scroll, clicking twice and holding results in a “normal” speed and beyond three clicks you get into fast territory. This sounds a bit odd, but in practice feels quite comfortable and intuitive. There’s also no problem with accidentally hitting the switches with your thumb; your thumb rests quite comfortably on the body of the mouse and it takes no effort to keep it there. The switches are responsive and take little effort to activate.

The OrthoMouse is a three button mouse and the third button rests just under the top of your thumb, which can be usefully mapped to Exposé. The two main buttons lie in the entirely intuitive index and ring finger positions and the buttons extend all the way from the knuckle to the tip of the fingers so you can use the entire length of your fingers to click. The microswitches again are of good quality and produce a clearly audible clicking sound.

The body of the mouse features high-grip textured surfaces across most of its surface and is made of a light weight plastic material. This doesn’t exactly give it a quality feel (our brains tend to associate heavier as being better) but it does help with the ergonomics by minimizing the effort required to move it across your desk. Even on a less-than-optimal surface the mouse also slides very easily and the tracking and sensitivity are good. The manufactures have even gone the extra mile and provided an “ultra-flexible” cord that “minimizes resistance to displacement”.

I can vouch for the result being vastly superior to the Apple “Magic Mouse” which on the hotel table (velours top!) that I wrote this on had huge problems with its tracking. The OrthoMouse worked just fine.

Having now worked with the mouse for well over a month, it has become my preferred input device. It’s comfortable and intuitive to use and just blends into the background. Precision tasks as well as general pointing and clicking tasks can both be performed without any problems. From a purely tactile point of view, it’s not as satisfying to move around as the Evoluent VerticalMouse, which feels a bit heavier and looks more aesthetically pleasing.

The “OrthoMouse” is a great compromise between proper ergonomic design and everyday practicality. Its industrial design emphasizes function over aesthetics without producing the medical equipment look that so often makes people shy away from such devices.

If you already suffer from a repetitive strain injury, this mouse is definitely worth a try even at its comparatively high price point of $109. If you don’t already have problems, now is probably the best time to make sure that it stays that way.

One of the results of all this was of course MacBreakZ, our “Personal Ergonomic Assistant” for the Macintosh.

Another was a constant stream of high-tech gadgets making their way through “Frank’s Ergonomic Testing Lab”.

Unlike many other people, I have always had a soft spot for track pads rather than mice. A track pad doesn’t need shifting around endlessly, it can do without buttons (which is nice for those fingers) and it’s super fast to just move the pointer around quickly in between bouts of typing. On the downside, they are imprecise and absolutely, categorically no good for anything to do with graphics or where you need pixel accurate positioning.

A lot of track pads are plain rubbish, especially those dreadful things on many cheap “netbooks”, so it’s no wonder they have a bad reputation. There are also some quite astonishingly good trackpads around, my all-time favourite easily being the Fingerworks iGesture Pad, which is a direct ancestor of the iPhone multi touch interface (Apple bought FingerWorks). They are no longer available, but seem to be sold at something of a premium for $999 these days! If you are interested, I’ll sell you mine at that price!

Anybody who wants to do anything graphical will of course want a digital tablet and over the years I have owned a ridiculous number of different models, most obviously from Wacom. The problem with tablets is easily described.. they rock at doing graphical stuff, but suck at anything else. The reason for this is that you need to put the pen down (or on its stand) each time you use the keyboard turning everyday tasks into an ordeal.

I always use the tablet for a few weeks and then it disappears rapidly into its box never to be opened again.. still next time will be different won’t it?

Sadly the same is also true for track pads. They usually stay next to my keyboard for at least a year, then get shoved back into their box when I start doing a lot of pixel-perfect stuff again.

Why not have both? A pen for pixel perfect work and a touch pad for quick clicks? Besides the space problem on your desk there is no reason why this shouldn’t work.. which is precisely why when Wacom announced their new Bamboo Pen and Touch Tablet, I had to have one.

The Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch Small Tablet combines a jumbo sized track pad that allows you to move the pointer with your fingertips with a “small” tablet that takes pressure sensitive pen input and throws in a few function keys and multi-touch gestures for good measure. In essence it’s a FingerWorks iGesture Pad with pen input. What could be better?

My first worry was that the drivers wouldn’t work properly. This is pretty much a Wacom trademark: great products, awful drivers, lots of crashes. Luckily so far everything seems to work just fine (as long as you don’t count the Bamboo Scribble handwriting recognition software that comes with the tablet, use Mac OS X’s “Ink” if you must).

As a long time Intuos user, I’m used to paying a lot of money for a tablet, but to also get great results. The Bamboo model range is much more accessible and well.. not of the same quality. The pen tracking is fine, the pressure sensitivity is okay, but it’s all a lot cheaper than the Intuos range.

The track pad is indeed large and works reasonably well, but bears no comparison with either FingerWorks’ or Apple’s efforts. On the FingerWorks track pad, you can roll your fingertip to make the pointer move just a little. On the Bamboo this does exactly nothing. You need to move the whole finger or nothing at all. In other words, as a trackpad it’s at the imprecise end of the spectrum, which would be a fatal flaw if it wasn’t for the fact that you also have the pen for precisely those kinds of tasks!

If you look at the entire package and factor in the sub-$100 price tag, it’s a great little input device. It is a tablet and offers all of the advantages of a tablet and it is also a track pad and offers most of the advantages of that type of device as well. Combined, you get a device that is fine for run of the mill pointing and clicking tasks, but also let’s you draw and supports tasks that require more precision.

You are left with a perfectly adequate (in fact more than adequate) input device for a wide range of tasks, but you can’t help thinking that there are better track pads and there are better tablets out there. It’s a bit like a washer/dryer, it doesn’t wash as well as a proper washing machine and doesn’t dry as well as a proper dryer, but cost less and takes up less space than having two separate devices

In future, Wacom will probably add multi-touch to its premium Intuos range and then we might very well get the best of both worlds at the kind of price that this entails. For now the the Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch Tablet is the only game in town.

I had expected Apple to leverage the FingerWorks iGesture technology that it acquired to greater effect on the desktop. If it worked fine a decade ago, why not offer a separate track pad for the Mac? We keep hearing about the combined pen and touch input for the fabled Apple Tablet, so I had kind-of-expected Apple to release something more exiting than the Apple Magic Mouse, which is basically a multi-touch trackpad on top of a mouse, but without the ability of moving the cursor with your fingertips.

In my view, it’s a strange decision because multi-touch on top of a mouse doesn’t really give you very much. Especially when your keyboard and its vast number of shortcuts is only inches away. After all if you want to navigate forwards and backwards the cursor keys on your keyboard do a perfectly good job. The pinching gesture and scrubbing gestures might be more interesting, but all this would be so much more intuitive on a track pad.

In the end, I think it’s a matter of Steve Jobs liking mice.. and not track pads.

Anyway, I ordered mine today for my “testing lab”, so I’ll be put right soon

I became a dad (hurray!) for the first time a very long 18 months ago. Since then everything has been a bit topsy-turvy. I quit my day job to be able to concentrate on my software business, but working from home with a little baby turns out not be the most productive environment to “get things done”..

Anyway, I did get quite a lot done over the past year or so, especially considering the many distractions and 2008 is going to be full of new improved goodness.

First in line will be the long awaited A Better Finder Rename v8.

Version numbering is always a problem. Whether you charge for upgrades or not, a “full digit” release is supposed to be an event. If you do charge for upgrades then it’d better be! If you don’t charge for upgrades then you’ll probably rather stay with version 1.1.2 anyway

Version 8 thus needs to needs to be chock full of new features and improvements, e.g.

• A new GUI?
• File filtering?
• Saveable presets?
• A new industrial strength renaming engine that make short shrift of a million renames?
• Automatic file name conflict resolution?
• Pairing up jpeg thumbnails and RAW picture files?
• Sparkle-support?

It’s all in the provisional feature set.

I bet you must have scratched your head when you saw version 7.9.6.1 recently? or 7.9.1 for that matter.

Well another problem with version numbering is that it is has an implicit message, e.g. version 7.9 means that 8.0 is just around the corner. Well it isn’t really.. my policy has always been to make lots of smaller updates. This gets lots of new features and improvements out to you guys quickly and makes sure that the program remains reliable over time (if something’s broken it must be the last thing you changed).

Now the temptation would be to take all these small improvements and instead of releasing them piecemeal, bundle them all up into major new release. I don’t want to name any particular company or product (”Apple”, “Mac OS X”). Looking at A Better Finder Rename’s version history, there’s 42 updates since version 7 came out. Now that would justify a whole new “full digit” upgrade, wouldn’t it?

Only of course, that’s not what I’ve chosen to do. So I basically start from version 7.9.9.9 (just joking) and everything that comes after that is “new in version 8″. Doing something heroic for each major release isn’t easy however. Last time over, I completely rewrote the program from scratch using Cocoa. Now that was a good effort!

This time over, I have lots of new features and improvements, all of which take a lot of effort to implement.. which means it takes a lot of time.. and I haven’t started properly yet. I really don’t want to do this, but I think I might have to go for Apple’s new trendy “7.9.10″ numbering strategy.. I wonder whether versiontracker and macupdate can handle this?

There’s another major factor that affects the release date of version 8. When I initially started coding on version 8, I quickly realised that I can do a much better job if I leverage all the new Leopard features. Lots of stuff that I was going to hand-code are already in there and frankly they are better than what I could come up with on my own. Then I quickly realized that “it’s in there, but it doesn’t work (yet)”. In Mac OS X 10.5.1 things are already a lot better and I expect that by 10.5.2 most things will work without a hitch.

So here’s the bombsheel: A Better Finder Rename 8 is going to be Leopard-only. This pretty much means that it will only be released once a significant share of Mac users have made the migration. I wouldn’t want to release something that only a few people can actually use. Right now it looks like about 30% of Mac users have made the switch, but by the summer I suspect it will be most of the people who download software from the internet anyway. Besides, v7 is still perfectly functional.

You might have noticed the “file filtering” on the new feature list. Yes, it’s time to say bye, bye to A Better Finder Select.

This originally was the file filtering component of the A Better Finder Attributes. This is another product that has long lived in the shadow of the mighty A Better Finder Rename, but has recently found a new lease of life after I included the ability to adjust the EXIF timestamps of digital camera pictures. It turns out that lots of people have lots of photos with screwy shooting dates.. the more the merrier. I have also finally found a way of changing the timestamps on the majority of RAW formats including NEF and CR2. I might even include this before the 5.0 release.

Then of course there’s our latest bad boy application, “The Big Mean Folder Machine“. It’s initial releases went fairly well and there’s a lot more in the pipeline for 2008. On top of that, I learnt a lot about Core Data which comes in handy for that new renaming engine. It’s hard to tell with a 1.x release, but I think I might have another hit application on my hands. Now that would be nice!

Last but not least, MacBreakZ, after its 4.0 rejuvenation efforts is once again doing fairly well and I can thus justify spending time on it. Since its release in late 2006, it has been updated regularly on a bimonthly schedule and I have some new illustrations and artwork stacked up as well. The dreaded 4.9 release is going to come up far too quickly again.. oh no! another “full digit” release!

This brings me to another priority for this year: documentation. I keep getting the same emails about documentation: “Where is the PDF manual?”, “Where is the download-able documentation”, “Where is the e-book?”, “Where are the screencasts?”, “Where are the tutorials?”, “Where is the major feature movie?”. You get the idea..

The thing is that no two people can seem to agree on what kind of documentation they would like to have. “Just do everything” is a nice idea, but it just isn’t possible. I’ve spent a lot of time recently finding out how other people deal with the situation and my web logs show that few people actually ever use the documentation anyway. Plus of course, it’s a bore

The Windoze guys all seem to solve this problem by using “Help & Manual“, the ueber-technical documenation tool. Unfortunately the only reference to the Mac that you can find on their site is an explanation of why it doesn’t work in Safari (it’s not made by Microsoft).

There are various tools available for the Mac, but they really aren’t any good.. I would plug my newly purchased Apple Help tool here, but it doesn’t do images (!) and I’ve been waiting for 6 week for a reply to my support request.. aarrgh.. at long last I have found something that’s better on Windows!

Nonetheless, 2008 is going to be the year of improved documentation on publicspace.net. Period.

I’m hoping to package an Apple Help documentation set with MacBreakZ soon and the other products will probably need to wait for their upcoming big releases. I’m also considering PDF versions of the manuals, which should satisfy most people..

Anyway, that’s all from me from now.

Take care,

Frank

Anyway, the Mac Pro does not support portrait mode! Arrgghhh… What do you mean NO portrait mode on a Pro graphics machine in the 21st century?

The nice people at Ergotron had felt a bit miffed by my report of how difficult it was to adjust their triple monitor stand from portrait to landscape mode and instead of suing me, convinced me to test their “new and improved” LX Triple Display Lift Stand, which I promptly reviewed on this blog.

Well, I’m happy to report that changing my monitors back to the long-awaited portrait mode was no problem at all and took less than 2 minutes; no outside help required

BTW If you have posted a comment on this blog recently, please do not be offended but it will probably never get out of moderation. Logging in today I see that there are over 10,000 comments for moderation and I don’t think WordPress is up to displaying all these in a web browser window. Sorry.

Today on the 29th of November after almost a year in development, three public betas and five private alpha releases MacBreakZ 4 is finally ready for prime time.

More than just protecting you from computer-related health risks (repetitive strain injuries, back ache, eye strain, headaches, etc..) the new version makes healthy computing fun. Based on ergonomic principles and almost 10 years of feedback from its users, MacBreakZ 4 makes it easier than ever to get out of bad work habits in order to work more productively and feel better at the end of the work day.

If you haven’t done so yet, check out what all this is about..

MacBreakZ has long been the break timer of choice for many Macintosh users having received a 4 mice rating from MacWorld in September 2002.

Version 4 is more than a simple upgrade, but is a re-thought, re-designed and re-written product developed in cooperation with a dedicated group of volunteer private alpha testers. The new version is completely re-implemented using Mac OS X’s native Cocoa libraries, but remains true to the spirit of earlier versions that repetitive injury prevention should be a fun rather than frustrating experience.

The extensive use of Tiger’s transparency and layering features and the invaluable input from our alpha testers have made MacBreakZ 4 far less intrusive than “traditional” break timers. Nick Miller, the lead cartoonist for the project, has contributed to the easy going tone of the product with his colorfull stretching illustrations executed in both a fun “informal” style and a more serious “business” style better suited for a more formal work setting.

In order to promote healthy computing on the Macintosh, we have slashed prices by over half for the introductory period of the product: a single user license is available for as little as $9.95.

MacBreakZ 4 beta 1 can be downloaded from:

http://www.publicspace.net/MacBreakZ/

I was astonished and gratified by the number of volunteers that contacted me. Could it be that interest in ergonomic computing is finally making it into the mainstream?

After an enthusiastic start in 1997, MacBreakZ went through quite a few releases offering any number of new and improved features. With 20/20 hindsight I made one major mistake in the development of this product: I used RealBasic rather than C++ to develop it.

My reasoning was sound (I think): MacBreakZ would be overwhelmingly a user interface application with little behind the scenes processing and speed was really not much of an issue. Back then, and even today, developers seem to fall over themselves to praise RealBasic’s suitability for developing this type of application.

Not so. In my own personal experience, with each new release the RealBasic compiler and run-time system seemed to fix one bug only to introduce 5 new ones of similar gravity. At one point (I think this was early OS X releases) some customers experienced “rainbow text”: each character in the text of all dialog boxes would be a different rainbow color. This problem, as so many others, eventually did get fixed by RealBasic but my confidence in the tool quickly droped to absolute zero. I decided to freeze development with version 3.6 which had proved stable for fear of introducing arbitrary new bugs just by recompiling with the “new improved” RealBasic compiler.

Before all hell breaks lose and every RealBasic enthusiast on the planet starts flamming me: I know you love RealBasic, have never had any problems at all with it and your software is great and 100% bug free; that’s just not at all my experience with the tool..

Back then in the 3.6 days, I hatched this plan to rewrite MacBreakZ in “a real language with a real api”. The first choice of development environment on Mac OS X is Objective-C with Cocoa using XCode: the same tools used to write OS X itself.

Unfortunately for lack of time, the plans remained just that for almost two years and MacBreakZ 3.6 now clearly shows its age and its legacy.

Back in April when the call for alpha tester went out, there wasn’t much code written. I had a very bare-bones activity monitor (the component that detects your mouse and keyboard activity), a rough state machine implementation and a few user interface elements.

The idea was to involve end-users right from the start well before the application design is fixed and major changes are difficult and costly to make. Getting end-users involved early on also opens your developer’s eyes to end-user issues: sometimes you’re the only person on the planet who thinks that a particular dialog or menu item is intuitive, while the rest of the world scratches its collective head and thinks “What’s that supposed to be when it’s finished?”.

In my experience, early user involvement leads to far better product: a product that actually addresses the needs of its users, rather than showing off the cleverness (in his own head) of the developer.

At this point, I obviously need to thank my alpha testers for the amazing feedback and support I have received from them: Thanks guys!

Not only is the new version fully re-developed in Objective-C and Cocoa, but it also makes big sweeping changes pretty much everywhere. In fact, it is more a new product than a new version of an existing product.

I have blogged about progress on MB4; the earlier post has a number of quicktime movies showing the new interface and some of the cooler new features.

Six months, a couple of hundred posts and ten alpha releases later, MacBreakZ 4 is ready to go into public beta. I’m going to spend the next week getting the “behind the scenes” stuff ready, but next Wednesday MacBreakZ 4 beta 1 will be officially posted to the website (If you write me a real nice email, I may send the new version before then ).

Current MacBreakZ owners will be interested to know that everybody who bought the product after the 1st of January 2005 will receive a free upgrade. Everybody else may like to know that there will be full-featured 14-day trial available from the website on next Wednesday.

It was great fun developing the new version and I hope you will like it.

Take care,

Frank

I expected one or two users to volunteer, but instead got an overwhemlming 43 alpha testers!

This, I think, illustrates that in the 9 years since MacBreakZ 1.0 was released, interest in ergonomic issues and awareness of computer-related health problems has increased dramatically. Unfortunately much of this is probably due to the number of RSI victims exploding after email, chat, blogging, surfing and all-night gaming have become normal parts of everyday life.

In the intervening years, I myself have learnt a great deal about what works and what does not work when it comes to break timers.

The major thing I’ve learnt is that prevention can only work if it is fairly painless. Sure, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, but before you’re hurt you don’t really believe that you could be at risk and as consequence you’re not willing to invest time and energy to change your work habits.

I’ve found that a good 80% of MacBreakZ users already suffer of one form or another of computer-related health problem.

MacBreakZ 4 will focus much more on getting people to use it as a prevention rather than as a recovery tool.

What can I for my part do?

• Make it fun.
• Show you how you’re doing.
• Let you customize the program to death.

MacBreakZ 4 features a lot of eye candy and has a “serious fun” feeling.

The omnipresent transparency effects are a nice example.

Take the activity monitor that shows you when you when your next break is due and how high your activity level is:

When the application is at the front, the whole window is draggable, when the application loses the focus, it fades into the background and lets clicks go through.

The “activity level” bar changes from “safe green” to “warning yellow” and finally to “danger red” as your continuous activity level increases. The amount of uninterrupted typing you do is a major risk factor in developing RSI. Even a tiny 5 second break from typing will dramatically reduce your injury potential.

Another example is the break window. It too is now transparent and features some additional eye candy:

Besides from being cool (you might disagree) these effects also have pratical value: they let you keep the information on how you’re doing on the screen while you are working.

My alpha testers and I are now on the 9th alpha release of the software and things are definitely starting to take shape. As often happens when I get end-users involved early, the feature list just keeps getting longer and longer and all bets are off on when the final version will be ready. Oh, yes I forgot: as usual, the end product will be 10 times better at least..

The call for alpha testers is now officially over because you can have too much of a good thing. For those of you are interested following the progress of this latest project, here is some additional info:

• I will continue posting progress reports on this blog.
• There should be a first public beta release in late summer
• Anybody who has bought a license during 2005/2006 will get a free upgrade to the latest version
• You can always leave comments on this blog or contact me via email; no need to be an official alpha tester to share your thoughts.

I hope you are as excited about this new release as I am..

Keeping the head straight all day while you stare at a computer screen is hard work for the neck muscles and they are one of the areas of our body that positively soak up tension. A trapped nerve in the neck can cause you to feel soreness and pain all the way from the shoulders down to the fingers.

This is a great stretch for releasing and counter-acting tension in your lateral neck muscles.

As always, this is not medical advice, you use the stretch at your own risk and you should consult with your doctor before engaging in any physical exercise..

After a while though, I got a bit fitter, I stopped hurting so much, my feet went about their business without complaining quite as much and I was getting close (okay, not that close) to my old performance levels. The first match arrived and I did ok, the second came along and it went fairly well and before I knew it I started winning us much as I was losing and in a word, I was back. The rest is history. Or not.

The only ache that refused to go away was a little burning sensation in my heel. I had been using my old squash shoes from 1995 until then. You know the "no cushioning, no shock absorption, ultra-flat sole variety that is a lot like running barefoot but with shoes on. In my defense, that's actually quite a good choice for badminton because you spend a lot of time on your toes and a light flat shoe is pretty much ideal for quick turning without spraining your ankle.

Unfortunately, I am no longer 18 and by the time I got expensive, well cushioned, badminton-specific shoes, my doctor called it quits and told me to stop playing for a least a year. Apparently I have an inflamed achilles heel and "those things can snap you know".

What's all this got to do with the Kensington Expert Mouse and more specifically with version 7.0?

Well, the moral of the story is that the gear you use makes a difference to how likely you are to injure yourself. Had I started out getting myself new badminton shoes, I might not have ended up with Achilles heel problems. Then again I might have pushed even harder and still got myself injured, so equipment alone won't get you a free "out-of-jail" card.

In this column, I will be reviewing all kinds of ergonomic gear for your computer work. Some of you may find the jump from competition sport to humble key pressing and mouse clicking a bit much to take. Well, actually it isn't such a large jump.

Whilst the forces involved in athletic movements are obviously much stronger, the muscles and joints that you use when working on your computer are much smaller and more delicate. What's more, you're not likely to play badminton or go running 8 to 12 hours a day, every day.

In a previous post, I did a quick calculation that got you to 1.8 million key presses a year; that's a lot of little shocks on fragile little joints and ligaments. In this first ergonomic gear review, I'll be looking at my latest ergonomic toy, the Kensington Expert Mouse 7.0 for Windows or Mac.

Well, first of all, it's not a mouse, it's a trackball and that's a good thing. Mice are by their very design likely to result in repetitive strain injury sooner or later. There are probably mouse than keyboard-related RSI problems. The tell-tale "my right hand hurts more than my left" sign points right at a mouse injury.

Anyway, it's a trackball, but please don't picture one of these tiny little marble sized things that used to adorne laptops a few years ago. The Expert Mouse has more in common with a pool 8 ball. The whole mouse is somewhat super-sized as far as pointing devices go. It measures a hefty 5 by 5.75 inches (around 12×15 cm) and is a good deal larger yet if you include the wrist rest.

Anyway, it's a trackball, but please don't picture one of these tiny little marble sized things that used to adorne laptops a few years ago. The Expert Mouse has more in common with a pool 8 ball.

The whole mouse is somewhat super-sized as far as pointing devices go. It measures a hefty 5 by 5.75 inches (around 12×15 cm) and is a good deal larger yet if you include the wrist rest. The trackball itself is surrounded by 4 large buttons and circled by Kensington's Scroll Ring.

When your hand rests on the trackball in the middle, your fingers falls quite naturally onto the 4 buttons. The button at the bottom left is far away the easiest to use and is (by default) mapped to the single click. Your thumb rests comfortably on it, so you'll probably do most of your clicking with the thumb rather than with the fingers. A sound decision given that it's your strongest "finger".

The top right button, which (again by default) mapped to "double click" is also easy to reach. In order to comfortably reach the top left and the bottom right buttons, I usually have to move my hand. The bottom right button does the right click and the top left button is a "click and drag" affair: when you click it, it select the item under the pointer and goes into "drag lock". The drag ends when you click the button again.

This is ergonomically sound thinking because it avoids the awkward "I'm holding down the mouse button while trying to move the pointer" problem. In fact, this is one of the neatest things about trackballs in general: you never run out of desk space. With a mouse once you've reached the edge of the work surface you need to pick it up and reposition it in the middle, not a great idea in general ergonomic terms and outright impossible while keeping a mouse button down.

The button themselves are heavy duty affairs with a distinct micro-switch feel to them. They produce a very distinct "click" sound that leaves you in no doubt about what you've done.

The Scroll Ring that surrounds the trackball is a new variation on the familiar scroll wheel. Unlike most scroll wheel implementations, this one makes perfect ergonomic sense. The typical Microsoft Mouse scroll wheel placed between the left and right button really forces you to adopt a very awkward finger position which is positively begging for long-term problems (bye bye middle finger).

The Scroll Ring does its job perfectly and is probably my favorite feature on the device. The ring has a slightly rubbery feel to it and you can turn it comfortably using all five fingers together or just with a single one. The surface of the ring is covered in little indentations into which your fingernails slip comfortably. I gives you the impression of working with a high precision microscope dial.

The ring moves by small very distinct notches. Scrolling through text feels very natural right from the beginning. You leaf through multiple screens by just continuously turning the ring. I love it. In fact it reminds me of a more precise version of Apple's iPod click wheel.

Some people are turned off by the admittedly fairly cheap "plastic-on-plastic" sound that the ring makes when it moves. Yes, I think Apple would probably have done a better job getting the sound right, but then again they make the worst mice in the world (pretty as they undoubtedly are).

Now to the real price: the trackball. As I said, it is huge. It is also surprisingly heavy. The Expert Mouse 7.0 uses optical sensors and the ball itself is just dropped into the hollow space in the middle. It moves with very little noise or friction. It provides a good solid feel, something that is often  missing from trackballs. Moving the ball with your fingers is comfortable and it has precise feel.

Most often when you use a trackball and you give it a good strong spin, the pointer will jump around the screen in an uncontrolled fashion until the ball comes to a halt several turns later; this is the trackball equivalent of banging your mouse on your desk in frustration With the Expert Mouse it takes some effort to get the ball spinning and the pointer remains very "collected".

I tried the latest beta release of Kensington's MouseWorks software for Mac OS X, which did its job very competently. The software allows you to remap the buttons, adjust the mouse speed (you can actually customize the acceleration curve which again adds to the scientific instrument feel), define application specific actions, etc.

One feature that is still absent is the ability to simply place the pointer automatically on the default button of a dialog box. This is a feature that used to be ubiquitous on Mac OS 9, but I have never yet seen it on OS X. What a shame!

What else is in the box? A USB to PS/2 adapter for older Windows machines and of course the wrist rest. The wrist rest is fairly large and covered in firm, but soft, fake leather and it does its job. In use, it is comfortable and I would personally recommend leaving it on.

The Verdict

Well, this is certainly the best trackball that I have ever used. It has a very no-nonsense built-to-last design philosophy. The ball itself is as precise as it is comfortable. In my opinion the Scroll Ring is the best implementation of the familiar scroll wheel design yet. The buttons are ok, but I find them a little bit too stiff to push comfortably. Of course, if they were any less stiff, you would end up pushing them by accident while rolling the trackball, still they are not my favorite feature.

In summary, this device has found a permenant place on my desk for the time being.

I only got it a few days ago, so I'll keep you posted on how it works out long term.

The price. Oh yes. It's not really cheap at $99.99 in USB/PS2 and $119.99 in its wireless incarnation. Then again, you get what you pay for.