ood user interfaces (UI) are "transparent." With a good UI, the user's attention is focused on the task at hand, not the interface. Unfortunately, the opposite is often true with today's UI. While your eyes are busy searching for information on the web or within computer documents, you frequently have to take your attention away from the information content and fiddle with the scroll bars, moving your window up, down, left, or right.

Not anymore! The IBM ScrollPoint™ mouse is an elegant solution to pointing and scrolling. With the ScrollPoint mouse, you can have power navigation literally under your fingertip.

The IBM ScrollPoint mouse is a research product from the IBM Research - Almaden. It integrates a miniature isometric rate controlled joystick into a mouse, allowing the user to scroll document windows in any direction, at a variable speed comfortable to the user. Our study showed that this type of "multi-stream" input works much more efficiently than a scroll wheel.

The ScrollPoint mouse won the Innovation'98 award at the Computer Electronics Show (CES).

"IBM's ScrollPoint Mouse closes the door on the Scroll Bar. After a few days with the ScrollPoint, you'll find you can't go back. The traditional desktop mouse now looks like just another rodent in the light of the ScrollPoint mouse's bells and whistles," reported ZDNet.