Finger trackball, a review and questions

[cme at consistent.org (Courtney Eckhardt)]

First, the review:

I just purchased a widget called a "finger trackball".  It's kinda
cute- it has a trackball operated by your thumb, and you hold it in
your hand, freestanding, so you can rest your hand on your lap or your
desk or wherever.  The left mouse button is a trigger-style button,
and pushed by your index finger, which curls around and helps hold the
unit.  Your middle finger goes under the botttom of the unit and curls
against a ridge to brace it against the movement of your thumb on the
trackballl.  The ball rolls smoothly and the sensors work well, and I
like the amount of button-resistance.  It's non-handed, and it even
has three buttons.  You can see a picture and some hype about it here:

http://cyberguys.com/cgi-bin/sgin0101.exe?UID=2001011621331590&GEN6=00&GEN9=5CG01&FNM=16&T1=133+0125&UREQA=1&UREQB=2&UREQC=3&UREQD=4

(Sorry for the long URL.)

The drawbacks, however, are multiple.  To press the trigger button,
you need to move your thumb off the trackball so as to brace the butt
end against the palm of your hand.  This becomes somewhat annoying
fairly quickly, especially since the solution would be fairly easy:
either have a ridge on each side of your middle finger to brace the
unit against, so that the middle finger can resist the pressure if the
index finger and allow the button ot be pressed, or add a pistol-grip
shape to the butt end so that it rests in your hand.  (This may all be
somewhat hard to understand without having used the trackball.)

With several trackballs I've seen, it's very hard to click-and-drag
with a button that's not the left one, since they intend you to take
your thumb off the trackball and operate the other two buttons with
it.  This trackball has that problem, but it's also very hard to
click-and-drag with the *left* mouse button, because of the bracing
problem I mentioned above.  This is arguably not a fatal flaw, as
either of the two solutions I mentioned above could probably be
executed with sculptor's epoxy (and even custom-fitted to your hand).

However, the damning thing is that functionally, it appears to only
have two buttons!  One of the buttons meant to be operated by your
thumb (the one on the left) sends left mouse button events, and the
other button sends right button events.  This is either a defective
unit, or one of the singularly most braindead design flaws I have ever
had the misfortune of encountering.  So there are three buttons, but
none of them send middle button events.  And as far as I can tell with
xev, the second left button doesn't send double-left click events, so
that doesn't seem to exonerate them.

It came with no windows driver; it's PS/2 and you plug it in and it
goes.  Oddly enough, there is *no* manufacturer listed all all,
anywhere on the body of the unit or the packaging.  There were the
usual FCC compliant with this-and-that markings on it, but there was
no FCC ID#.  The only information on its origin is that it's made in
Taiwan, and that's bloodly helpful, huh? :/

The questions:

Anyone else have one of these suckers?  What do your button events
look like from it?

Anyone have any clue what company makes it?

Anyone know enough about the innards of PS/2 pointing devices to be
able to tell me if this is a salvageable situation, or if I should cut
my losses and return the damn thing?  Knowing nothing about the ways
these things are supposed to work, it seems possible to me that you
could do something like switch what pin the data came in on, thereby
changing which button even it was seen as being, but I sort of doubt
it.

Thanks for any help you may be able to give,
Courtney Eckhardt
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