Griffin Powermate

I know at least one of you has one of these!


Well guess what, I want one but I'm utterly broke

So while I scrounge up the dough to purchase one (any duggestions) I'll do the next best thing to owning one--I'll talk about one on CPF.

How's the twist action? Is it effortless or is there some resistance? I imagine it'd be a bit like a Potientiometer...

There's some, it's like the tuning knob on a good amateur radio. Very smooth.

OTOH, I've yet to hear a really good use for the thing. Sure looks neat, but that's an expensive volume knob.

Hey! I haven't got myself a good expensive toy in a long time. I've been spending all my money on flashlights and they're far too practical to be called toys.

I can think of lots of uses.

What would be a practical purpose of that thing?

I've got one on one of my Macs. I have it set up to be able to scroll inside PDFs under OS X (without screwing up my other mouse button assignments), until Adobe and Apple get their act together on that one. I think it looks so cool and feels so good that I'd leave it hooked up even if it didn't do anything (but I'm a sucker for anything with blue LEDs... been thinking about replacing that yucky green thing in the iSub with a blue one).

John

I've got one on my Mac as well. it's a lot of fun. It does remind me of a stereo volume knob, they even had a special edition a while back in black. You can set it so that when you use it as a volume control, the LED gets brighter. It also pulses when the computer is asleep. You can adjust the amount it moves things in the control panel. I mostly use it for scrolling and volume control. I plan on using it with my movie editor for advancing and going back frames. The knob can be pushed and it knows the difference between a long and short click and pushing the knob in while turning it. I still have the one button optical mouse, so I use the knob click for other things. The new Apple Safari browser has a feature that lets you mark a page to go back to, like a search results page. I use the long click to mark the page and the short one to go back to it. That way, when I'm several levels deep and diverted from my original search, I get back to it instantly.

cool. what is it?

A USB HID.

In other words, a one axis input device, with one button, and a variable brightness blue light output.

http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/powermate/

Only good use I can think of is playing Centipede