Mouse Not Required?

Chromose asks: "Being a system administrator by day, and coder/artist/gamer by night, my hands and wrists get their fair share of exercise around the clock. I've had lumps on the back of my hands off and on for a couple years now and just recently discovered they are ganglion cysts. And although pain and stress has been minimum up to now, I worry of what continuing everyday keyboard and mouse stress will lead to. Introducing FingerWorks. I stumbled across their iGesture Pad on ThinkGeek the other day and started digging for reviews. What reviews I have found exclaim how remarkable the products work, but not many reviews could be found. It sounds like the answer to my search for relief, and it sounds too good to be true. So I'm asking, who out there has used these things and are they truly a revolution in the making?" Yes, ThinkGeek is part of the Sinister VA Software Kieretsu, but if you aren't worried about it, then neither am I.

Comments

Well, here's a review...

[Eneff]

http://www.meetthegeeks.org/ourreview/fingerworksi gesture/

From what I can tell, it seems to be testing out as alpha and might not be quite ready for prime time.

TouchPad

[Crazy Ukrainian]

How exactly is the touchpad on thinkgeek an improvement? You're still resting your wrist on something and moving something else. Seems oddly similar to a mouse, but I can't quite figure out why...oh I do wonder.

Re:TouchPad

[cgenman]

While it is true that you are not moving the keyboard / mouse, you are still moving your hands, which weigh significantly more than a little piece of plastic. Likewise, while tapping on a hard piece of plastic in theory takes less energy than tapping on moving keys, the keys also serve to deaden the impact. I tend to find tapping angrily on solid surfaces to become uncomfortable rather quickly, and would doubt long-term use would be good for the joints.

If you are looking for something ergonomic to reduce the strain on your wrists, use your keyboard navigation as much as possible, and when not possible try a trackball. Assuming you're in Windows land (which is why you would need a mouse), the Kensington Expert Mouse has a wonderful series of chordable buttons that can be mapped to basically any function you might do frequently, giving you a palette of 35 imput commands per program. Plus you don't move your arm, wrist, or anything but your fingers when you point.

Nomenclature

[Flamerule]

Quoth Cliff:

Yes, ThinkGeek is part of the Sinister VA Software Kieretsu, but if you aren't worried about it, then neither am I.

Mmm... keiretsu, actually. You're unlikely to see an "ie" combination in Japanese.

Eye Trackers and such

[Oriumpor]

I really really really want an eye tracker myself, the cost has been prohibitive I have found for the lowly engineer. However, these might be helpful.

also the Ability hub has an interesting piece on accessibility.

The TrackIR GX looks interesting, although not as a mouse alternative, it can be used to make your neck hurt so you can script 17 actions with the movement of your head.

IBM has been working on an eye tracking solution, I remember seeing something on TechTV a while back, anyone know the progress on that?

I had the same thing

[g(zerofunk.org)]

Speaking from experience of having those damn things I suggest that you get to a doc's office asap and have them removed before they get worse. I waited over two years to have it removed and im left with a nasty scar on the upside of my wrist and about 30-50% weight abality in my right wrist. The worst thing about it is that the scar tissue is so bad that the bump from that is bigger then the lump that I had from the Cysts.
g

Re:I had the same thing

[Atrapose]

I don't know what butcher you had cut on you, but my 5 y.o. daughter had one removed on her wrist about 4 months ago, and the scar is so small that it's hard to tell which wrist had the thing on it. The Dr. made a horizontal cut that went along the grain of the skin (yes, skin has grain) so as she grows, the scar won't elongate or continue to keloid. We had tried several other treatments before (draining, constant pressure, etc) but it always came back in a week or two. Surgury worked, and if a Dr. can remove something from a wrist no bigger than my three fingers, then you can find one that will remove it from your hands w/o damage.

"Violence is the last resort of the incompetent" -- Asimov

Deja vu

[pjcreath]

These keyboards have been discussed on /. before, but thankfully more than 24 hours ago. Check out the prior articles on FingerWorks keyboards for a lot more information.

The review I wrote is here. As a further update to their helpfulness, my keyboard died for no apparent reason, and they're fixing it for free (a long time after I bought it).