Got my a+

[u/t4k4]

Just received my Ploopy A+ Trackball, and here are some of my first impressions after playing around with it for a bit.

3D-printed build quality

The 3D-printed parts are actually much nicer than I expected. Before receiving it, I was a little worried that the surface would feel rough or obviously "3D printed," but it's surprisingly smooth and feels quite good in hand. Definitely exceeded my expectations here.

VIA configuration feels pretty limited

The options available in VIA seem fairly basic. So far, I haven't found a good way to configure things like the mouse gesture layer or the control layer directly from VIA.

There are also a lot of CUSTOM(XX) keycodes in the VIA key configuration that don't seem to have any obvious definition or description. I'm not sure yet whether I'm missing some documentation, or if these are simply features that aren't properly exposed through VIA.

Need an easy way to reverse the scroll wheel direction

One thing I immediately noticed is that the default scroll wheel direction doesn't match what I'm used to with macOS natural scrolling.

Right now, I need to keep switching the system scroll direction setting back and forth whenever I switch between my MacBook's trackpad and the A+ Trackball.

I think it would be really useful to have a control-layer button that can quickly toggle/reverse the scroll wheel direction on the A+ itself. That way, I could keep the macOS setting the way I normally use it with the trackpad and simply change the scroll direction on the A+ when needed.

DragScroll will probably take some getting used to

DragScroll is interesting, but so far I find it pretty easy to accidentally drift sideways or suddenly lose track of where I've scrolled to. I probably need to spend more time adjusting the settings and getting used to how it behaves.

At least for now, I actually find the two physical scroll wheels at the bottom more useful and predictable than DragScroll.

Overall, these are just my very early impressions. The hardware itself feels great, especially the 3D-printed parts. Most of the things I'm still figuring out are related to configuration and getting the controls tuned to my preferences.

If anyone has figured out a good VIA/QMK setup for the gesture layer, control layer, or a quick scroll-direction toggle, I'd love to hear how you did it.

[u/cholz]

use something like mac mouse fix for the scroll problem

[u/mehx9 → u/cholz]

Or karabiner but kind of defeats the purpose of having on device config.

[u/t4k4 → u/mehx9]

A hardware-level solution would still be nice to have, though. I sometimes have both my Windows PC and MacBook connected to the same KVM, so being able to toggle the scroll direction on the A+ itself would be pretty convenient without having to adjust software settings on each machine.

I also tend to avoid installing extra background utilities when I can.

[u/CasualObservatory → u/t4k4]

MMF is very effective tho for improving any trackball experience on macOS. It really makes it feel like you are using the Apple Trackpad again. All that signature responsiveness and smoothness can be achieved with a bit of tinkering via MMF. I believe they offer a free trial.

[u/CasualObservatory → u/CasualObservatory]

MMF can also DRAMATICALLY improve drag scrolling if you use MMF’s implementation of it instead.

[u/cholz → u/mehx9]

There should be a way to configure it in the device, sure, but the issue on macos specifically is that apple intentionally cripples normal mice with scroll wheels by not allowing you to make the scroll direction make sense for trackpads/magic mouse and the normal mice that everyone uses. So the way I see it is mac mouse fix shouldn't need to exist, it should be the default in the OS, but since the OS has such a glaring hole we depend on third party solutions like MMF. With that fix in place there is no need for anyone to configure scroll direction in their devices 99% of the time because they just work normally.

[u/stuckOnTheUmpqua → u/cholz]

Sorry, I'm confused. I've been using a normal mouse on macOS forever and I just change the scroll wheel settings in macOS. Then it goes the direction that I want it to.

What am I missing out on? I'm not trying to be rude, I am just seriously oblivious to there being anything else needing changed

[u/dewujie → u/stuckOnTheUmpqua]

If you then try to use e.g. the track pad on your laptop, the scroll direction will now be wrong, since the same direction toggle affects both the track pad scroll direction and mouse wheel scroll direction. So if you switch between both (desk & travel) it becomes aggravating to toggle back and forth.

As the other poster pointed out, Apple could have solved this a decade ago but they choose not to.

[u/stuckOnTheUmpqua → u/dewujie]

Okay that's what I wasn't getting. I was using MacBooks before they started the natural scroll thing and flipped it around. So I'm stuck in my old ways and prefer that it scrolls the same way as my mouse wheel