“Made of high-quality machined aluminum, PowerMate feels like a solid volume knob pulled right off the front of a world-class stereo. Its heavy weight and tactile feel are a welcome departure from typical plastic USB peripherals”

But, I’ve been procrastinating over this for a long time and I think it’s time to find the cash for one – especially with the novel idea of using it with Adium :)

Plus I’d never thought of using it for PS brushes – genius :)

Anyway, I didn’t play with it for much more than 10 minutes, so I can’t comment too much. First impressions count though, and I while I can see some applications for such a device if it was a bit more solid then I would’ve been more convinced …

Just read about Binary Bonsai getting analog with the Griffin Powermate … Imagine setting up a bunch of these for a media center PC that’s tucked away in an entertainment center case.

You know you want to buy another one and turn the laptop into the worlds most expensive “Etch-A-Sketch”

Good comment Greg. Anyways, as long as you are not being paid for the product review…(which I highly doubt) then I am always willing to hear your opinion on products. I have looked getting one of those for my PC, but just could never bring myself to spend the money on something I know I’d only use for volume control and for the “coolness” factor of its look and it is something not many people would have.

I found it handy with newer builds of Adium that support AppleScript events, as I’d tend to piss people off ignoring their IM messages when I KVMed to another box… :)

Bought mine at the MacMall employee price grins of something like $32 or so from the Santa Monica retail store I work at, been happy ever since. The v1.6 software (pre-Tiger, latest version of the driver) worked perfectly with Tiger from day one.

And yes, I tried other Bluetooth mice well before I bought the Power Mate. First I got (still have, never use it) is the MacMice The Mouse BT, which is just garbage. Have never been able to get smooth tracking on it, this is using the Bluetooth module BTO’d for my G5 tower. Nice mouse, crappy construction, even worse tracking. I tried the MacAlly BTMicro next, just as bad, felt nice, but tracking is abysmal, just like the other 99.9999% of Mac-compatible Bluetooth mice.

So why the Power Mate? Cause there’s not a single Bluetooth mouse I’ve tried yet so far for the Mac that has the smooth tracking of Apple’s mouse. Definitely makes a good companion for two-handed mousing/scrolling.

Summary of how I use it: Scrolling up/down, forward/back, changing tabs (cmd-shft-left arrow/right arrow), not much else, don’t need other controls myself quite yet (perhaps laziness is a contributing factor as well).

• Using it to complement your mouse hand (and therefore removing some stress from your wrist)

• Binding “decisive” actions (mark, flag, copy, paste) to the button (saving you the trouble to do Cmd-something)

After a while, you won’t feel it’s there – it just becomes natural.

For extra brownie points, get Tofu, paste large chunks of your RSS backlog into it (I use newspipe, so I can get my news in large digests with 20-30 items apiece) and use it to scroll horizontally on your 20” monitor.

I also miss some sort of tactile feedback when rotating – clicking would be nice, indeed, since you would be able to count brush size steps and the like without glancing at a palette.

(Incidentally, bulleted lists are apparently shot in your comment CSS, the preview doesn’t show them, but I’ve been using Textile for a while now, and those are bullets…)