Razer Left Me Wanting

As I've likely prattled on about before, I use a mouse left-handed. I am not actually left-handed, at least when it comes to handwriting and most of my artistic ventures. The art I make on my computer benefits from a mouse over a pen tablet since the number pad does most of the work whenever the slower, precise movements of a mouse are not adequate. Most legit lefties I know have cruelly forced themselves to simply use their mouse right-handedly, especially when they're at work, and especially at work if someone got it in their head that everyone should have a so-called ergonomic mouse. Fortunately, most of the mice at my work are as ambidextrous as they are basic. 

As much as I don't mind keyboard shortcuts, having some of those shortcuts on the same hand as my mouse is extremely convenient. Perhaps it's from years of console gaming wherein all your important moves are managed by your thumbs rather than your fingertips. Before the Apple Pencil, my favorite stylus for my iPad was from Adonit, and it had two little shortcut keys near the tip. I mapped my un/redo keys to these two buttons and I got so used to it that when I used a real pencil and needed to erase, I instinctively squeezed the end I was holding. As for the mice I've had, there have been many, and I'll spare you the long, drawn-out narrative and get to the point by showing you the mouse I'm currently using at home:

No words. Should have sent a poet.

I like the Maus. I love the styling, it's got a good heft and weight to it, and the wireless has never been a hindrance to me. My only real gripe about it is it's a little small. This is hardly a dealbreaker as you shouldn't necessarily be resting your palm on your mouse anyway. Your forearm should be parallel to your desk and you shouldn't drag your arm on the surface, just as you shouldn't necessarily be resting your wrists in front of the keyboard. When the workaround is getting rid of a bad habit, I can let some things go. Given that, there is another gripe that's a little harder to ignore. It's that little silver button below the scroll wheel. It controls the DPI. 

If you don't know, DPI stands for Dots Per Inch and it refers to the sensitivity of the mouse, how fast you can move your cursor across the screen. The higher the DPI the faster and farther the arrow flies across the screen with less movement of the mouse itself. Most of you probably never bother with this, especially if the computer isn't technically yours (even if it is yours in the sense that you use it regularly and are expected to be productive with it). Some of you probably know you can adjust this sensitivity setting in the control panel, especially if some jerk who used your computer before for some reason needed the sensitivity way down so you'd have to practically sweep everything off your desk just to move your cursor halfway across the screen (or picking it up and putting it back down over and over, feeling a little more ridiculous each time you repeat the motion). 

By the way, that so-called "natural" option for scroll direction can kiss my ass.

Some mouse makers have decided burying this slider in a menu not many people bother with until something goes wrong and solved the "problem" by allowing you to adjust the sensitivity of your mouse on the device itself. It makes sense, but I've always wondered why the button to do so is typically below the scroll wheel and tilted towards the wheel (as it's following the slope of the mouse's shape) to make accidentally clicking on it virtually inevitable. The Maus compounds this problem by giving you the option of about a half-dozen different DPI settings, at least four of which seem to be for people who move their mice by gently breathing on them. Maybe on a 4K monitor it evens itself out, more pixels on screen means a higher DPI is needed to cover the same distance. 

There is a genius alternative to this that I hope more mouse makers catch on to. It's called a clutch. The idea is that your mouse is set to a higher DPI to let you navigate the screen faster. When you need to slow down to make more precise and controlled movements, you push a small button on the mouse to bring the DPI down to its lowest possible setting. When you need to go fast again, simply release the clutch. 

It's currently on the Razer Basilisk and the Logitech G502, both of which are ergonomic mice with no left-handed option. In fact, Razer used to be rather friendly to the lefty crowd, with left-handed versions of some of their most well-regarded mice, including the Death Adder and especially the Naga. The Naga has a full 12-button keypad for the thumb, which may sound crowded, but is fairly navigable. I had one of these mice for a long time and it served me well. I speak of it in the past tense because the middle click gave out. Despite their internal switches being rated to some insane number of presses, the one under my scroll wheel missed that QA inspection. 

Fortunately, Razer has a pretty generous support and warranty policy. Unfortunately, that doesn't guarantee they'll be able to replace or repair everything in their product range. As the left-handed Naga was no longer made, they offered me a short list of mice to replace it with, which were all right-handed ergonomic mice, including the Death Adder, whose lefty counterpart had also been axed recently. 

How's about HELL NO!?

Further mucking things up was the oversight of these many alternatives being out of stock. The silver lining to all of this was that I could opt to take a store credit and wait for a mouse they had coming out called the Viper. I could conceivably have gone for a cheaper mouse that was ambidextrous, but that would have left me with almost half of the store credit left over and nothing to use it on besides maybe a really nice mat. The choice before me then was either to take a gamble on this new mouse, or remap the middle click of the Naga to one of its many programmable buttons and therefore throw off my entire workflow (as I would have proper middle click on every other mouse I'd use). I chose the former option. 

Have I ever mentioned how much I love braided cables?

The Viper has been good, but it is so very just shy of perfect it almost brings the whole thing down. For what it costs and what it offers as a mouse, it's overpriced compared to other offerings in the catalog. Given it cost the same as my Naga did when it was new, it really felt like a downgrade. However, as I didn't have much of a choice what with being given store credit and all, I figured its size would be its saving grace, being near enough to the Naga that I wouldn't have to reorient myself with its feel. It gets a lot of other things right; it's got the braided cable, the DPI switch is out of the way (on the bottom of the mouse, in a small recess that you need a pen to push), and it is truly and legitimately ambidextrous. 

While it doesn't have the full 12 keys of a Naga, it's got two shortcut buttons on either side of it. Assigning my two most common shortcuts to them has, for all intents and purposes, made up for it not being a Naga. What it doesn't make up for is Razer's slow crawl towards a right-handed catalog. There's also the weight, which is my biggest complaint about it. For its price, the Viper feels cheap, almost fragile. I'm almost convinced the cord weighs more as sometimes the cord slipping off the back of my desk will pull the mouse down with it. It hasn't sent it tumbling into the narrow chasm between the desk and the wall, and I doubt it would, but I don't get why this mouse needs to be this lightweight. 

Computer mice occupy an amusing space of product design. Once upon a time, the computer mouse had to be the size and shape it was to accommodate a rubber-coated metal ball. Too big and the mouse would be hard to move. Too small and the ball would just as soon slide on a surface as roll. More importantly, the mouse had to house the mechanism needed to make sense of the ball's movements, little roller pins and optical sensors reading off tiny slotted flywheels. Later on, the optical sensor took center stage and could read off the surface directly. This meant the pins and flywheels had to be replaced with a few more chips and other components because it had to do more processing power to make sense of what it was seeing. As time went on, those components became smaller and smaller, with less hardware needed overall for the sensor to make sense of where it was on your desk. This made for a fair bit of empty space inside the mouse. 

One of the most audacious uses of that empty space was an arrangement of slots for metal weights. Weighing down a mouse seems like a weird thing to do, but just like the DPI adjustments, sometimes you need to be able to move your mouse in a fairly controlled and precise manner. A high DPI combined with a weighty mouse gives the best of both worlds. 

So you now understand the weight of the situation.

The Viper definitely has the empty space for such weights, but the only way I'm going to get that is the DIY route, and I'm not about to start drilling holes and prying stickers and panels off of an 80USD mouse (that's also what the G502 costs, weights included). 

Luckily, I've found a few alternatives outside of the Razer catalog such as Steelseries and Corsair. They don't have weight options, but they are notably heftier than the Viper along with sharing a similar form factor. That includes those shortcut buttons on either side of the casing. To be fair to Razer, since its release, the Viper's price has come down a little. It's still not low enough for me to begin exploratory surgery, but I don't hold the price point against them anymore. Last week, I was looking through their site to get some specs for a LinkedIN post I'm writing covering this topic in a little more work-related depth. I saw they offered two new versions of the Viper, one wireless, and one labeled "mini." I thought all my problems were solved. Wireless mice make use of that empty space by storing a battery. The battery adds weight, and I've got hefty where wimpy once was. However, Razer, in their wisdom, found a way to make the wireless Viper weigh virtually the same as the wired version. That's okay, I thought, I've got an option. Yes, the mini is smaller, but it's also about half the price, well within the territory of being modified with no real blow to the bottom line. 

Then I got a better look at it. 

Can't see the problem? That's okay. I didn't spot it right away, either. 

... 

... Razer? I want you to look at me. I want to ask you a question and I want you to think long and hard about your answer before you tell it to me. I want you to think about all that I've said about the past designs of your products which I have praised you for. Okay, here we go:

How can it be an ambidextrous mouse when the shortcut keys ARE ONLY ON ONE SIDE!?

It's the LITTLE things....

Look, I get that making left-handed versions of your ergonomic mice isn't ideal for you. There simply are not enough left-handed mouse users to justify production on that scale. 

By the way, LoFree isn't off the hook either.

Define symmetry for me, please.

In their defense, the place on the right-hand side where some shortcut keys would be nice is taken up by an adorable little storage compartment for the wireless dongle as well as the charging port. As I said, I do like the Maus, but I prefer it as a portable accessory for my iPad when I need to use a mouse with it. The same goes for the keyboard I've got at home right now. It's fine enough for the Mac mini, but it's better suited to accompany a tablet. 

A wise one once said that art is never finished, only abandoned. I suppose I've got the same philosophy with my workspace, a constant work in progress. That reminds me, I have to get back to designing my new desk. 

My Not Quite Office Setup

When the Apple Pencil debuted, there was a quiet debate in the community as to how Steve Jobs would have felt about it. The starting point for this discussion was a talk he gave about the iPhone, in particular how frustrating he found the idea of a stylus. 

The counterpoint to this is that Jobs’ issue with the stylus was how it was used as a workaround for a bad user interface, that of a scaled-down desktop OS rather than something dedicated and befitting the medium. This is the reason for the whole tile-based, gesture-controlled philosophy of iOS and, by extension, Android. This was definitely a risk, and not a well-received one at the time. 

As a card-carrying member of that initial camp envisioning the iPad as an OSX-enabled touchscreen-enabled laptop akin to some of the tablet computers HP had out at the time, I remember being legitimately annoyed at how the iPad was just going to be a giant iPhone. I’ve spoken before about this disconnect between people like myself who seek more productivity-focused devices and the average consumer who simply want to watch videos and read emails. In my defense, I wasn’t totally wrong about the target market and the initial capabilities of the iPad. Between the price and the size of the app store on launch, it was an over-engineered e-reader, a digital picture frame with a battery, anything but a productivity-focused piece of hardware. It had creative potential, no doubt, but it felt like it had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from that casual market who saw it as having their toy taken away to be a mere tool. 

While I stand by my initial criticisms, I’m happy to have since been proven wrong. I’ve been drawing on an iPad for about 4 years now and I frankly don’t want to draw on anything else. As for other types of productivity, that’s been a little more trying. I recently purchased a new Bluetooth keyboard that’s gotten me writing more. I also recently learned that newer versions of iOS have added mouse support, allowing me to unbag my Lofree Maus and use it to... well, that’s still in a trial phase. 

Mouse support is actually something that’s been present in iOS for some time, as part of the accessibility setup for people with mobility issues. With the recent release, it’s now more discoverable to people who wouldn’t have otherwise given the accessibility part of the menu the time of day. The cursor appears as a dot which seamlessly morphs into the more familiar vertical line cursor we’re used to seeing in word processing apps, and if you’re not happy with only the single click nature of an Apple mouse, you can customize the buttons for other functions. Windows users know mice have a left and right click (as well as a center click and scroll, but we’ll get to that in a moment), one being for selecting, the other being for a kind of context-sensitive menu. Fortunately, iOS has this, though it’s not activated by default. It takes a little getting used to as it’s not quite the same as right click on Windows, but the added versatility is welcomed. The scroll wheel seems to be reversed depending on the application and has a bit of lag on it, but I think that’s just another session of rummaging in the menu away from working as it should. Then there’s middle click, and we hit a very big wall. 

Not every Windows mouse has this, typically the more gimmicky or stylized ones, and chances are even if you’re aware of it, you can count the instances in which you’ve needed it on one hand. If you work in 3D at all, whether it’s full modeling or simply viewing models, you know how essential middle click is to that workflow. If you’re going to do any kind of CAD work, you need that middle click. That’s why if I were going to do more CAD work at home, I’d likely spring for something in the Surface line. I can certainly do some 3D work on my iPad and even use my Pencil for some of the more complex features, but this is only good in a pinch. I’m certainly not going to be asking our IT department to take my desktop back. 

In the end, I think the “is it a computer yet?” approach to iPad functionality is the wrong mindset. The computers I grew up with are not the computers used today. The very fact that I use “computer” to refer to a desktop or notebook (remember when we called them laptops?) itself is an arbitrary choice, as even pocket calculators are computers, yet we don’t criticize them for not allowing us to read email. 

PC Master Race... Leans Left?

This is a partial paraphrasing/rewrite/expansion of an article I wrote on LinkedIn about something I meant to talk about on DeviantART (and may still since I want this to focus on gaming and not art) but that's about as complicated as this story gets... maybe. 

A lot of artists I know use graphics tablets, with many of them calling their mice bars of soap and about half as useful for drawing digitally. It surprised me, then, to learn from Ash Vickers of Megacynics that vector art is primarily done with a mouse. It made sense the more I thought about it, especially as I started experimenting with vector graphics. I also started doing CAD for work, which also uses a mouse (Solidsmack has a wonderful article about using a stylus for CAD, by the way). Needless to say, I had my work cut out for me. This made what happened next a little more scary than it normally would have been. 

I'm right-handed (that's not the scary part) and one morning, I found that I slept wrong somehow and my right arm was extremely sore. It more than likely would have gone away on its own (and it did), but given that I had a full day of design work ahead of me using that very arm, I would be playing a dangerous game of either keeping my arm in pain or making it worse. This made me really anxious, if rather pitifully so. I sat down at my desk, looked at the arrangement of peripherals on my desk, and took a calculated risk. The keyboard got shifted to the right, and the mouse hopped over it and landed on the left. My left hand was going to have to learn CAD and vector work the same way sadists and deadbeats teach nervous kids to swim, chucking them straight into the deep end. 

There wasn't even five seconds of adjustment. 

Seriously, I didn't even need to switch the left and right buttons in the control panel. Using my middle finger for left click and my index finger for right click felt every bit as normal as the opposite arrangement on my right hand. Okay, there was a little bit of a learning curve in the precision and accuracy department when it came to clicking and dragging, so let's bring that five seconds up to about five minutes. This was all about a year ago, and I have no intention of going back. In fact, I'd like to invite all of you to give it a try. You can switch the left and right mouse buttons if you want to, but you may be surprised how intuitive the setup truly is. If you're skeptical, and you're at your desk while reading this, I want you to look down at your current arrangement of mouse and keyboard. Unless you're using a small laptop or you specifically asked for a narrow keyboard, yours likely has a number pad, with a little cross of arrow keys separating it from the nation of QWERTY. Those arrows are going to become important later. This added real estate, which is wider than your hand when it's in a relaxed position, creates a rather onerous compromise when it comes to productivity. 

Seriously, why does this look weird?

Think about it, in order to center the home row of your keyboard under your screen, you have to put your right arm at almost a 45 degree angle away from your body to operate your mouse. This is a little less drastic if you have a trackball, but let's save that discussion for when we talk about Centipede and Missile Command. (let's just say if you're not tossing the keyboard aside and putting that beautiful billiard ball front and center, you're doing it wrong!). If your job involves more typing than clicking, you may be okay with this and it's entirely possible it will never pose any problems for you. Likewise, if you need your mouse more than your keyboard, then having home row off-center can be equally tolerable. In either case, though, you're missing a trick, quite possibly the ultimate office life hack.

If your HR department has invested any time and effort into discussing office ergonomics with you, it may be familiar to hear something along the lines of keeping your arms as straight as possible. This is spot-on. Arguably, your muscles can get used to being at odd angles, but 1) you shouldn't have to, and 2) your muscular system is fundamentally give-and-take. If muscle group A has to work a little harder, muscle group B doesn't. Simple isometric exercises and stretches can help with these, but like we said in point 1, you shouldn't have to. 

Here's where this gets interesting: gamers already get the most out of this clumsy arrangement, but only because of a compromise. The typical keyboard-and-mouse arrangement for something like a first-person shooter or a few other genres that involve navigating a three-dimensional space works out like this: the mouse controls the camera or where your character looks, while the W, A, S, and D keys move your character forward, left, back, and right (respectively). In this setup, the far left side of the keyboard and the rightmost reach of the mouse allow your arms to rest straight in front of you. 

You've nailed it... or have you? 

In my CAD work, I don't use my keyboard that often, not compared to the number pad. It's used about as equally as the mouse. Having my mouse on the left lets me center the home row of my keyboard, which puts my arms straight ahead, with the left resting on the mouse, and the right resting on the number pad, with those arrow keys almost equally accessible. I've even got the arrow keys on the number pad thanks to the Num Lock key if needed. 

Having my mouse on the left lets me use the arrow keys for what they arrow keys are made for. 

Yes, that sounds obvious, but if that's obvious, why is the WASD arrangement somehow "the norm"? What do you typically use the left analog stick on a game controller for? The camera, with the right analog stick controlling your movements. Funnily enough, this arrangement for dual analog controllers as pioneered in Alien Resurrection for the Sony Playstation was heavily criticized at the time before quickly becoming the norm. Now consider that in old-school gaming, especially in the arcade, movement controls are on the left. Meanwhile, left-handed arcade sticks put movement controls on the right, where right-handed console gamers operate movement controls anyway. 

Gamers are already fundamentally ambidextrous and we don't even realize it. 

It's only appropriate, then, that Razer (By Gamers, For Gamers) would be pretty much lead the charge in producing left-handed ergonomic gaming mice. There are others, but they're playing catch-up on the whole, with many content with catering to office environments where fewer buttons are required. 

Ironically, despite what I said earlier about not needing to reverse the mouse buttons in the control panel, the default layout of the left-handed Naga mouse reverses the clicks. Luckily, Synapse (the application Razer offers to customize their mouse buttons) makes the switch easy. Unfortunately, because it's an application, it's not there right away when I boot up, and there's a few minutes every morning when I have to mentally swap sides until everything gets up and running. For the sake of convenience and not dealing with adding more programs to startup, I swapped the clicks in the Control Panel. So, the left-handed mouse is actually less intuitive to my left hand than an ambidextrous one without modification. Razer, if you're reading this, worry not, for I forgive you ;) ... but if you really want to make it up to me, maybe you can put that MOBA-friendly Naga Hex mouse on fast-track to getting a left-handed version? This 12-button keypad is kinda tedious ;P