IBM’s original pointing stick, the TrackPoint, understood its purpose: to save you (a slight bit) of time and mental effort. A new peripheral seems like an homage to the IBM’s tiny nub, but misses the point.
I’ve never used the new Ploopy Bean, though it immediately launched itself into the running for the worst product name of all time. But what this $70 CAD peripheral ($51, at press time) promises to offer simply flies in the face of IBM’s original design.
The Bean is an external, wired, pointing-stick mouse, planting a trackpoint-like nub squarely in the center of four different buttons. Ploopy will ship the Bean in three tiers, from an early-access tier to two production runs, essentially integrating the nub with four Omron D2LS-21 clicky buttons that can be configured via the QMK firmware that powers thousands of keyboards, and the VIA software that helps configure and customize it. So while you can use the Bean as a traditional mouse, it also appears that it could be configured to launch specific commands or macros. That, I think, helps rescue it from what it should not be: an external trackpoint mouse.
In the Old Days of technology reporting, I lived zooming up and down California’s Hwy 101 (and preferably, 280) back and forth between my office in San Mateo and various sites in Silicon Valley — including IBM’s Almaden Research Center, where the TrackPoint was born. I even conducted a long interview on IBM’s pointing stick with (if memory serves) Ted Selker, who invented the pointing stick and who explains the concept in the video below. (Some of my previous employers jettisoned their archives long ago, and my handwritten notes have been lost to time.)
While the computer mouse is now ubiquitous, it has a weakness: it takes time for you to move your hand to the mouse, move the mouse, click, and return to the keyboard. Selker understood that moving your hand back and forth to the mouse wasted a small amount of time — 0.75 seconds, according to Wikipedia. The nub allowed the typist to keep their fingers on the home row of keys. Of equal importance was the fact that it eliminated the need for a separate mouse, something that every college student typing notes inside a cramped lecture hall appreciates.
The Ploopy Bean drops a drippy deuce all over Selker’s original vision of an integrated control stick. A mouse, because of its size, is easy to grasp or at least bump into. Trying to blindly find a 3.3 x 2.5 x 0.6in. flat plastic peripheral, and then center a finger or thumb over the nub, seems horrifically counterproductive, as does the risk of inadvertently tapping one of its buttons. That’s not to say that Ploopy skimped on engineering, however; the Bean polls at 1,000MHz for smooth scrolling, and the schematics are provided for easy modding.
Weirdly, though, the Ploppy Bean does seem useful for a certain task: a laptop remote control. The academic conferences that I’ve attended in recent years either leave presentation management to a dedicated assistant; alternatively, the presenter simply clicks back and forth between a series of slides. Granted, it’s not often that a presenter will actually need to interact with their material, and they can certainly so simply by placing their laptop on a podium. Still, one has to imagine that there would be a customer for a wireless version of the Bean, if just a niche one.
I’m certainly not against different input modalities. I’ve long been a fan of touchscreens, even if my own personal use case is relatively minimal. Dictation within Windows makes sense, for certain users and situations. I’ve used mice and trackballs, as well as years of ThinkPad trackpoints. I’m less in favor of the external touchpads I’ve tried. I just think that the Ploopy Bean probably needs to be flushed.
