Scroll wheel mouse


SCROLL WHEEL MOUSE

A scroll wheel (or mouse wheel) is a hard plastic or rubbery disc (the "wheel") on a computer mouse that is perpendicular to the mouse surface. It is normally located between the left and right mouse buttons.

Scroll Wheel Mouse

Functions of Scroll Wheel Mouse

It is used, as the name suggests, for scrolling. It can also be used as a third mouse button by pressing on it. Some modern mice can scroll horizontally as well as vertically, using either a tilting scroll-wheel or a scroll ball . Logitech Micro Gear mice use a 14 gram scroll wheel which can preserve the moment of inertia like a flywheel and can be used to quickly scroll through long pages and lists. The Orbital mouse by Cyber Sport takes a new approach with its continuous scrolling capability, achieved by employing the whole round mouse as a scroll wheel which rotates on a ball bearing base.Scroll wheels are prevalent on modern computer mice. To many users, they have become an integral part of the hardware interface. However, non-wheeled mice are still available. Scroll wheels can also be found on such handheld devices as portable digital audio players, PDAs, or BlackBerry devices. On the Apple iPod, the scroll wheel uses touch sensitive technologies from Synaptic (instead of being mechanical).



History

The scroll wheel was invented in 1995 for the Genius Easy Scroll mouse made by Taiwanese company KYE Systems. The man credited with inventing what we recognize as the wheel is Eric Michel man. It first gained popularity in the late 1990s when operating systems had the feature built-in, and is notably one of the first additions to the basic two-button mouse design used for PCs that became a de facto standard. It is also one of the first hardware elements (aside from high-speed modems) designed directly in response to the proliferation of the World Wide Web, where efficient mouse-only scrolling is most useful. Also, clicking a hyperlink with a third button or scroll wheel can create a tab in certain web browsers. In the 21st century, scroll wheels started appearing on keyboards as well, particularly on Logitech and Microsoft models. It is usually located to the left of the caps lock key. The implementation of scroll wheels on laptop computers has generally faded, while touch pads are often made with the edges acting to scroll the page (rather than to move the cursor), partly making up for the lack of a scroll wheel. On recent Apple laptops, scrolling is achieved by touching and dragging two fingers on the touchpad at the same time. Many Linux distributions offer a third method of scrolling using the touchpad, where the user will first activate scroll-mode by pressing in a corner of the pad, and then dragging in a circle around the center of the pad, letting go of the touchpad will switch back to the default mouse-mode.




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