Labels

Categories: Food | Travel | Beer | Wine | Boston | Humor | TV | Tech | Pop Culture | Politics | Golf | Video | Photo | Auto
Sponsored: Samsung | Cadillac | Volt | GMC | AT&T | Gear List: Cameras, Lights, Microphones, etc.
More: SteveGarfield.com | Steve Garfield's Video Blog (archived 6/19/2013)
“As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.” | Mastodon

Friday, December 21, 2012

Using a Mouse For Seniors: To move FORWARD, you have to go BACKWARDS.

I just got off the phone with my mom.

She's got a new iMac and is having trouble with the mouse.

Untitled
Image: Mom surprised that we got her a new iMac

She used to have a MacBook. That laptop had a much smaller screen than the new iMac, so now, when she moves her cursor around, she runs out of mousepad space.

Do you know what I mean?

She's running out of runway.

I explained to her that she needs lift up the mouse and move it back to go forward.

Oh we had a good laugh about that.

I went online to see if I could find any tutorials that might help explain the concept.

This guy is great. He lets you slap him around.

BBC - WebWise - Computer Basics - The mouse
Image: BBC - WebWise - Computer Basics - The mouse

Click here to visit the tutorial - BBC: Computer Basics - The Mouse, if you can get the mouse to move the cursor over here. ;-)

I enjoyed the tutorial but wanted to explain how to use a mouse in more detail, so I used the following practice page, from Seniornet, and made a video:



Seniornet Mouse Exercises: Put your mouse on a number and watch it disappear.

More activities are here: Free Mouse Exercises.

Update 12/26/12:

Solved the problem of getting the mouse cursor all the way across the screen. We sped up the mouse.

In System Preferences you can set the Tracking Speed. That's the speed at which the mouse travels across the screen. I set it to go faster. Now it takes less mouse movement to make the mouse move across the screen.


Image: SYSTEM PREFERENCES > Mouse > TRACKING SPEED