[Mark Rejhon]

Hi,

Has anybody developed software to add haptic feedback (brief vibes) when rolling trackball?

Basically, a "click" (a super-short vibrate using the vibrator) when spinning trackball (quick, tiny 0.1 second vibrate for every 'click' vertically), to mimic tactile feel lost by losing trackwheel from older models.

If a short vibrate could be invoked everytime the trackball moves one menu option vertically, this would provide tactile feedback that roughly mimics trackwheel clicking. You may have heard of vibrating touchscreens that simulates haptic feedback from engadget: article ... this background application would simply add haptic feedback to the trackball on the newer 8100/8300/8800 using the BlackBerry's own existing vibrator unit.

If any software developer is interested in doing a try at it, use the Alert.startVibrate(x) call to operate the Blackberry vibrator, where x is milliseconds. (You can do super-short vibrates this way). The trick is to somehow monitor the trackball activity while running in the background, so I leave it as an exercise to the developer to figure out whether or not that is possible in recent BlackBerry API's.

[Nextel User]

it should be. dynoplex uses the trackball as a mouse in the eoffice application. and i have seen programs in the older versions work with the vibe, so.... someone make this.

[crs]

It's not really possible for a 3rd party developer to do this as there's no way to globally watch and respond to the trackball events. They are app specific and only programs that implement a visible UI can watch for trackball events.

[Mark Rejhon]

Then a demo application needs to be made to test the feasibility of this, and encourage RIM to add a "Vibrate" option to Options -> Screen/Keyboard -> Audible Roll.

As I am deaf, I can't hear the trackball clicks, and this would be useful to me. I realize this will use more battery power, but that is an acceptable compromise.