Poetry in motion

One of the badges of office of the ‘power’ CAD user in the late 1990s was the SpaceBall, or 3D motion controller — a hi-tech joystick-like device on the opposite side of the keyboard to the mouse.

At the time these devices separated the professional from the amateur, the rationale being that two hands are quicker than one. In the ‘one-handed world’ the mouse does everything except type alphanumerics and issue keyboard shortcuts.

Operations such as panning, zooming, selecting and picking menu commands all fall to the mouse, which involves multiple trips to the menu bar to select icons and pop down menus.

Even with systems that have right-mouse click- context sensitive swapping between functions, valuable time can be lost. So the SpaceBall, with its ‘alwayson’ motion control increased design productivity time by 30 per cent with 50 per cent less mouse usage.

There was also an option to control other operations with function keys and initiate macros if you could be bothered to program them.