Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances

d43.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 103 posts

Re: The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances

#31

Post by kabdib »

feralchimp wrote: post #28
lloeki wrote: post #25

Wild guess at where it might come from: 32ms divided by 4 is 0.008s which gives us 125Hz (the typical mouse sample rate). So my guess is that some form of mouse movement analysis (like mouse smoothing) is working on at least four samples (so that it can statistically mean something), rolling. Why it does so might be that 32ms is the right time to evaluate the intent of a typical human interaction with a pointer, mayb…

I'm a little surprised that mouse state is something that a modern OS would be sampling (as opposed to, say, getting events 'pushed' by the device up through the driver). Or is this one of those "all event systems are really sampling once you look deep enough" things?

USB is a polled system. Doesn't mean you can't "push" data through it with some kind of supersampling, but you need to hit a rendezvous with the host controller.

32ms is FOREVER for game input. That's two whole frames of a 60hz game.

Re: The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances

#32

Post by simcop2387 »

starwed wrote: post #4
gnaffle wrote: post #2

I've always had this problem, and as a result I really can't use an external mouse with OSX. I've never had a problem with using the trackpads. Like one of the commenters mentioned, using synergy from a Linux PC solves the problem for me. For a period, I actually resorted to running a Parallels instance of Linux with the external mouse attached to it, and setting up synergy to share the mouse pointer with OSX. I'd li…

Yeah, that's the one reason I never really run Ubuntu on my Air, even after I successfully jumped through all the hoops to get it installed. :) I tried several different sets of tweaks but none of them felt right. Especially, I don't think any of them let you select with one finger and then drag with a second. (Last I tested was about 6 months ago, I'd say.)

That's one of the things that the fairly recent Multitouch patches to the Xorg input layer should begin to fix. How long it'll take for environments to start implementing things like that I'm not sure.

Re: The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances

#33

Post by ericdykstra »

I started using SteerMouse to get rid of the acceleration, which helped that part of the problem, but I didn't have an explanation of why playing Starcraft 2 on OS X feels less accurate than when I play on my home computer except that it didn't 'feel' right. I don't notice it when I'm just working or browsing the internet, but when I'm trying to accurately control mouse movement to specific spots repeatedly in a game, it's a glaring flaw. Kudos to the author for figuring out the root cause of the issue. Hopefully now someone will be kind enough to offer a fix.

I can't understand why this issue would persist in a major operating system.

Re: The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances

#34

Post by kenrik »

melloclello wrote: post #20
eykanal wrote: post #10

Longtime Mac user here... for what it's worth, I don't know what the OP is referring to. I use both Mac and Windows regularly (home vs work), and I don't see a noticeable difference. Maybe I've just gotten used to it. Definitely isn't a problem for me.

Agreed, I've never noticed any kind of problem - I'll happily play Left 4 Dead for hours with the MacBook trackpad.

I have never noticed it while using a trackpad however I have noticed it while I was using a Bluetooth mouse (I blamed it on the mouse) Now I don't know if it's the mouse or OSX.

For gaming it would be a bad thing however I don't have the time to play games and even if I did I would boot into Windows to do it.

Re: The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances

#35

Post by feralchimp »

elarkin wrote: post #29
feralchimp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little surprised that mouse state is something that a modern OS would be sampling (as opposed to, say, getting events 'pushed' by the device up through the driver). Or is this one of those "all event systems are really sampling once you look deep enough" things?

Mice don't send a continuous stream of information to the computer. Instead, they send samples at some rate. It's that rate that lloeki is referring to.

So the mouse itself is polling/sending at a particular rate? It sounded to me from the article (and the above commenter) like the host machine was doing the polling.

Re: The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances

#36

Post by astrodust »

silversmith wrote: post #18
eykanal wrote: post #10

Longtime Mac user here... for what it's worth, I don't know what the OP is referring to. I use both Mac and Windows regularly (home vs work), and I don't see a noticeable difference. Maybe I've just gotten used to it. Definitely isn't a problem for me.

I did not, for the longest time. That is, until I installed Team Fortress 2 for office LAN party. Having played it on Windows, it was a world of difference - OS X version seemed so inaccurate, even after getting rid of acceleration.

When you're playing a game like that you become highly attuned to the characteristics of your input device.

I find the same thing happens when playing console games and the "look" stick acceleration curves are completely different between games. It is disorienting until you get your bearings and adjust to the speed and acceleration of each input system.

Just as switching between Windows and OS X means switching from CTRL to CMD, you kind of have to go with the flow on mouse speed, acceleration, and so on.

Re: The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances

#38

Post by tambourine_man »

Conversely, I've always hated Windows mouse response.

Granted, I've never owned a Windows box. Every time I had to use one I was deeply annoyed at that inaccurate epileptic pointer.

But it's a common complaint among converts. There should be an option for that.

Re: The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances

#39

Post by joezydeco »

lloeki wrote: post #25

Wild guess at where it might come from: 32ms divided by 4 is 0.008s which gives us 125Hz (the typical mouse sample rate). So my guess is that some form of mouse movement analysis (like mouse smoothing) is working on at least four samples (so that it can statistically mean something), rolling. Why it does so might be that 32ms is the right time to evaluate the intent of a typical human interaction with a pointer, mayb…

When working on drivers for capacitive touchscreens (of which trackpads are a pretty close sibling), we put all kinds of IIR filtering in there to smooth out the cursor and usually a variance filter to take away noise. Since those filters (esp. IIR) rely on data from previous scans, they naturally introduce a delay into the chain.

Usually this is all on the sensing side and not the host side. Perhaps there's some trackpad filtering that's being applied to the mouse when it didn't need to be?

Re: The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances

#40

Post by oacgnol »

I always knew that there was something off about the Mac OS X mouse pointer, but no one I knew really thought anything of it. Coming from using high end gaming mice on Windows machines for 8+ years, I could feel the difference with the mouse pointer on Macs having a slight lag to it no matter how fast the machine.

That being said, Mac touchpads feel like heaven and I haven't used a single PC touchpad that even comes close to it.

Post reply on HN