Kensington Trackball, OSX and QuicKeys X2...

[sinnic]

I have a Kensington trackball, and in OS 9 the MouseWorks program was more versatile with what you could do. The main feature I loved that was lost in OSX was you could have regular button click do one operation, and have button click with a modifier key do another (top right mouse button by itself was page right, and option - top right mouse button was page left). I e-mailed Kensington about this, and they said they couldn't do as low-level programming in OSX as they could in OS 9 (which didn't make sense to me since I thought OSX was built on a UNIX platform, but what do I know). So now what I thought was such a simple, but effective, feature is lost.

So now we've just got an OSX version of QuicKeys, and I was wondering if anyone has figured out how to get the above feature back using QuicKeys and MouseWorks together somehow. Can QuicKeys recognize specific mouse button clicks as input commands for a Hot Key? Has anyone tricked QuicKeys to think so? Any answer would be appreciated.

[1m1]

I feel your pain, this is one my main reasons for staying primarily with OS9 for the moment. I love Mouseworks for OS9! The feature you mention is called "List View", and I had correspondence with technical support from Kensington about 7 months ago. I was told that this feature was being dropped PERMANENTLY I still keep hoping with every new update they'll change their mind. Maybe we need to email/call them to insult and shame their programmer(s) into figuring out how to do this in OS X. They really don't seem to be working on the program very hard. Updates are far and few between. Disappointing.

I still haven't really found a solution yet that I'm happy with. What I like about Mouseworks OS9 is that it lets me do a lot without really having to move my hands too much. Between the modifier keys and my four-button mouse, I have 17 operations programmed that I can do with almost no movement. Very ergonimically friendly. My shoulders, back and neck stay much healthier.

I'm not a Quickeys expert, but as far as I can tell, it won't do this. It's still a great strokesaver though. The OS X version of Quickeys still isn't up to the OS 9 version yet, feature-wise.

So, an upgrade in these two programs is unfortunately still a downgrade.

[sinnic]

Permanently removed! That saddens me very much. I've heard about a program called USB Overdrive that might do what we need, but I haven't tried it out yet. There's also a Kensington Forum called Maccessories. I'm going to post up on there because one of the software developers is a member (iJoe), but it looks like he hasn't posted since December 2002, so maybe that route is a dead-end.

With Panther having security issues supposedly, OSX doesn't look that good to me anymore.

[sinnic]

Also, this is the reply I got from David Winter at Kensington in October when I complained to them:

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello.

Thank you for your comments.

Many features Kensington had built into MouseWorks for the OS9.x
versions can not be built in to the OS10.x due to limitations of the
newer OS. In OS9 Apple provided many low level functions that we were
able to leverage to provide the features of MouseWorks. Many of these
functions are not available in OS10.

"The other thing was if you held down Option while showing the
pop-down menu for assigning a buttons command, you got the "Custom..."
option at the bottom, allowing you to program a very custom key command
to a single button press."

I believe you should be able to accomplish the same effect by using the Keystrokes function of MouseWorks2.3.
- Open the system preference pane.
- Select mouseworks.
- Select the button(s) you wish to program
- From the drop down menu, select 'keystrokes'
- Enter the keystrokes you wish to send to the system upon pressing that button.
- Provide a meaningful label if you wish.
- Click 'OK'

David Winter

[1m1]

I downloaded and tried USB overdrive just a few days ago. No joy - didn't have the feature we want. I ended up just going back to Mouseworks for OS X.

That reply from David Winter is similar to some of the replies I got from Kensington when I was trying to tell them why I wanted List View. At least some of them don't really seem to understand what it is we want and how we like to work

I hadn't heard about the security issues with Panther. Do you have a link that can steer me to some info about that?

Let me know if you get iJoe's attention.

[1m1]

One driver software in OS X that I've never tried is Logitech's.

Can anyone tell me if it allows you to hold a modifier key (or combination of keys) and then click a mouse key to send a programmable command?