Features
The sensitivity of the TrackPoint is usually adjustable, and can be set to provide an extremely light touch.
Press-to-select is an optional feature, where a sharp tap on the pointing stick is equivalent to a button-click. Any of the three mouse buttons can be configured to be the desired object of this gesture. A problem is that inadvertent clicking of the button may happen when the pointing stick is touched during typing.
Together with software wheel-emulation, the Trackpoint (and 3 buttons) can provide almost the entire behavior of a 3-button, 2-wheel mouse. Tapping button-2 will generate a middle-click; holding button-2 while simultaneously moving the pointer will generate vertical and horizontal scrolling events.
The TrackPoint III and the TrackPoint IV have a feature called Negative Inertia that causes the pointer's velocity to "overreact" when it is accelerated or decelerated. Negative Inertia is intended to avoid feeling of inertia or sluggishness when starting or stopping movement. Usability tests at IBM have shown that it is easier for users to position the pointer with Negative Inertia, and performance is 7.8% better.
Read more about this topic: Pointing Stick
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“These, then, will be some of the features of democracy ... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, particolored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)