Wireless Mice Keep Getting Better

As is his wont, Craig Crossman of the McClatchy-Tribune News Service has noted another trend that makes cyberspace navigation that much easier ...

The computer mouse has seen many technological improvements, but I maintain there are three that stand out.

- The first was the use of light to replace the clumsy little rubber ball that would deposit dirt and other matter into the friction wheels so that they would eventually stick and cause your cursor to move erratically on the screen.

The first optical mouse required a grid mouse pad, but thankfully today's models work on most any desktop, and the better ones use lasers for more accurate tracking on a variety of surfaces.

- The second significant advancement was losing its tail. While corded mice still exist, the cordless ones offer the best mousing experience.

- The third was the addition of more than one button. Today, the two-button mouse is pretty much the standard, with Apple Computer ironically being the last one to embrace it. Today's mice come with all kinds of buttons in different places, doing all sorts of things, many of them user-definable.

Finally, the scroll wheel was added. Usually positioned between the two buttons, you can roll it to scroll the contents of any open window up and down.

Logitech advance

Logitech has taken all of these milestones and improved on them even more in its newest mouse, but it has also come up with what I believe is a revolution in this new computer mouse's scroll wheel. It's SmartShift Technology, and you can find it as well as the other good things in the Logitech MX Revolution mouse ($99.99).

Talking to Logitech, I discovered that the scroll-wheel mechanism took a team of engineers about a year and a half to perfect. After using it for just a day, I say their effort was worth every moment.

The wheel is actually part of a sophisticated drive mechanism that's part mechanical and part electronic.

The wheel is weighted and balanced so that if you give it a good flick with your finger, it will spin for around 7 seconds. The included software translates that movement into a super-smooth vertical panning that lets you accelerate through multiple pages in a word-processing document or hundreds, even thousands, of lines in a spreadsheet in only a few moments.

Logitech calls this the Hyper-Fast scrolling mode. But that's just the beginning.

Briefly depressing the scroll wheel puts it into an ordinary ratchet mode where you feel little bumps as you rotate it. In this mode, each bump moves the window's contents a defined number of steps.

And here's where Logitech puts it all together. The software can detect which application the active window belongs to when the mouse cursor passes over it. At that moment, the little USB transceiver sends a signal to the MX Revolution and puts it into the scroll mode you want to use within that application.

Speed or precision

For example, you may want Hyper-Fast mode to whiz through a spreadsheet, and the ratchet mode in Photoshop for precise movement.

After setting it up, all you do is your work, and the MX Revolution will automatically switch scroll modes as you switch windows.

I think Logitech pulled out all the stops with this mouse. It has lithium-ion rechargeable batteries so when you place it in its matching stand, the segmented green battery display animates to show it's charging and how much power it has.

A new button prompts a search of any word or phrase that's highlighted when pressed. On the Mac, it can be configured to summon Spotlight or use a search Web site of your choosing.