The Logitech Trackman Wheel Trackball Mouse (to give it its full, silly title) is an entry level trackball input device. I recently picked one up in an attempt to combat some soreness I’d been experiencing in the wrist area after a long day’s work!

I chose this device because it was competitively priced (just £24.99 from play.com) and I didn’t want to spend any more than that without knowing how I would react to a different type of input device.The mouse plugged straight into a USB port and ‘just worked’ out of the box. I use it at work on an  Ubuntu machine, and there was no faffing around with drivers or anything like that – just plug and play.

The mouse is nice and big, and to me, it’s comfortable to use. I have pretty big hands (stop sniggering at the back!) and I feel like my hand is just resting on it while I use it. I’ve noticed a significant lessening of wrist pain and fatigue after using this mouse.

I’ve been using a standard mouse for around twenty years now – about two-thirds of my life – so I was initially a little concerned about how long it would take to get used a trackball mouse.

My first instinct when using the Trackman was to turn up the mouse speed. In particular, you might feel there’s a little more effort required in moving the mouse around if you’re using two or more monitors.

I also found that for the first week or so, my pointing and clicking accuracy was lower than usual, so allow yourself some time to acclimatise. However, it became second nature to me pretty quickly after that. In fact, it feels weird going home to use a ‘normal’ mouse now!

If you’re looking for something a little bit different, or you’re concerned about aching arms, you could do a lot worse than this mouse.

I’ve just finished reading Pro JavaScript Techniques by John Resig, and I thought I’d post some thoughts about it.

The author, John Resig, is the creator of the popular jQuery library. He also works as a Javascript evangelist for Mozilla, so there’s no doubt that he’s one of the best known proponents of the language.

Although I use the jQuery library on a daily basis, I was keen to brush up on some of the finer points of Javascript; my knowledge of the jQuery library probably exceeds my knowledge of Javascript! For this reason, I thought the book sounded good.

The first half of the book certainly doesn’t disappoint. Covering the nitty-gritty of DOM traversal, OO Javascript, and unobtrusive scripting, the book does a great job of covering a lot of ground in a concise, clear manner. The key concepts are illustrated with plenty of code snippets which do a great job of illuminating the subject matter.

The second part of the book was less useful for me, illustrating some examples of AJAX functionality, image galleries, autocomplete, that sort of thing. These topics might have been considered intermediate to advanced in 2006, when the book was released, but the plethora of options around today means that developing stuff like that now is re-inventing the wheel. (Of course you might be interested in learning more about wheels!)

You can almost see the snippets of code in this book forming the nuts and bolts of the jQuery library, and it’s interesting to take a look at the hoops we developers would have to jump through to otherwise gain cross-browser compliance.

I’m just glad I’m not the one having to negotiate those hoops myself!

To sum up, this book is still worth reading for the first half alone, and the stuff on OO javascript, scoping, closures etc is really useful. But some might consider the book a little out of date, so be warned.