A few months ago, I found myself working on a relatively enormous color collage in Adobe Photoshop for a class here at The Savannah College of Art and Design (taught by our very own illustrious Jim Alley). Having just done a color laser proof of the image, I decided that two intricately shaped figures needed to have their color saturation boosted relative to their background. The “magic wand” tool was only useful up to a point; to be really precise, I had to blow the image way up, go in with the lasso, and hand-select the borders of the two figures, pixel by pixel. Needless to say, this took quite a while. But after an hour or two of serious mousing, I had the figures captured and got the job done.
Knuckling Under
The next morning I woke up and discovered that the first knuckle of the middle finger on my right hand was almost completely numb. No problem, I thought, I must have slept on it wrong or something. I went about my business, had a more or less normal day, got up the next morning and found that my finger was still numb. I began to worry: was this some bizarre disease? had I had a miniature stroke or something?
Then it occurred to me what the problem was. Selecting those two figures pixel by pixel had involved hours of tightly gripping the standard Mac mouse; the knuckle in question had been tightly pressed against the upper right edge of the mouse the whole time. I had mashed the nerve that runs under the bottom left of that knuckle against a piece of hard plastic for God knows how long, and now it was dead as a doornail. It was then that I resolved that if I was going to do a lot of intricate graphic work on the Mac, then it was time to look into a replacement for the mouse.
As it happens, I had read an article somewhere (Publish!, I think) about alternatives to the mouse just a few weeks before. Some of these I’d already tried: trackballs are nice, but they’re awfully hard to draw with; optical mice aren’t all that different from the standard mouse, except that they have to be kept in alignment with their gridded pad, which is very irritating; joysticks are for kids. I’ve never tried a stylus, pressure-sensitive or not, but they’re pretty expensive. One of the alternatives mentioned, though, was something called a MousePen, by a company called Appoint. Not too terribly expensive (at least compared to everything else), it was said to be shaped like a pen and handled like a pen. I’ve been handling pens for decades without ever bruising a nerve in my knuckle, so on a whim I decided to go ahead and order one.
That, as it turned out, was not so easy. Nobody in Savannah carries one. But to my surprise, most of the big mail-order houses didn’t have it. To my knowledge, MacProducts USA, in Austin, is the only company that sells it. (Their latest ad lists it for $67, which is quite a bit less than I paid for it back in February.)
Let’s High-Tail It
On arrival, the Mouse Pen turned out to be roughly five inches long and a half inch square, attached at a 45° angle at one end to a base containing a small mouse ball (“the ultimate ballpoint pen!” commented one local wag) and with a four-foot long ADB cord coming out of the other end. Two buttons sit at the foot of the pen, just above the base, right where your index finger normally wraps itself around the pen. The bottom button is your normal, average mouse button; it does what you’d expect a mouse button to do, and has a bump in the middle of it to make it easy to feel and find. The button above it controls the tracking of the Mouse Pen. By default, the pen is set to accelerate the cursor motion depending on the speed with which the pen is moved. This is sometimes handy on a big screen, but on my little SE at home a mere flick of the wrist can send the pointer clear across the screen and back again, so I usually click the button to change the pen to geometric tracking: move the pen a little, the cursor moves a little; move the pen a lot, the cursor moves a lot.
So how does the MousePen feel? Well, pretty good. It takes a little getting used to. The fact that you have to actually pick it up rather than letting your hand fall on it (as you would with a normal mouse) is sometimes irritating. The MousePen comes with a small mouse pad, though, that has a hole cut in the top of it in which the MousePen can sit upright, which is convenient. Unfortunately, the MousePen doesn’t work very well on the material that mouse pad is made of. But it works fine on almost any material that isn’t polished and smooth: a piece of paper, a book, your pants leg, etc. So I just use the mouse pad as a pen holder and run the MousePen on whatever happens to be between me and the Mac. Having the mouse cord flopping around above your hand instead of under it can also sometimes be a nuisance, but it’s easy enough to flip it out of the way, and it’s long enough so that it generally stays out of the way.
Not to put too fine a point on it…
My biggest complaint is that the MousePen is still too chunky to feel like a regular pen; it seems to me that the innards can’t be so complex that the MousePen couldn’t have been made a bit thinner. Another improvement that could be made would be to roughen the surface of the plastic around the base of the pen, where your fingers grip it; the smooth plastic surface sometimes slips a little in your fingers just as you’re tracing the last of that complicated figure in Illustrator. And the tracking ball is fairly small relative to the size of the pen base that it’s set in; if you tilt the pen too much while you’re using it, the base grinds against the surface you’re drawing on and the pen comes to a halt.
Give that man a cigar!
Still, learning to use a regular mouse doesn’t come easily to most people either. John Warnock once compared drawing with a mouse to drawing with a brick; drawing with a MousePen is more like drawing with a cigar. It’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement. I didn’t do a lot of comparison shopping; I don’t know if there are similar products out there that perhaps work a little better. What I do know is that I’ve been using the MousePen for nearly four months now, and my hand feels fine so far. It took two or three weeks for the feeling to return to my finger, by the way. Bruised nerves take a long time to heal. If you use a mouse a lot and your fingers are as important to you as mine are to me, you might want to consider the MousePen or something like it. At the very least, if your mouse is getting beaten up or worn out, keep in mind that the MousePen is cheaper than buying a new mouse from Apple. It won’t hurt to try it. Literally.
The article above is reprinted from Mac Monitor, the newsletter of The Savannah Macintosh Users Group. It may be reprinted in a single issue of newsletters published by non-profit user groups. Payment shall consist of a single issue of the newsletter in which the article appears, sent to the following address:
