Move over Microsoft 3000, here comes Logitech!

Ok. So apparently if you drop your M'soft 3000 wireless notebook mouse one time, and also sort-of bend the usb transceiver thingy with your leg while you're sitting on the couch the mouse's buttons stop working. That was really my fault, so I went back to the store to get a new one; promising myself to be more careful with the next one.

Right next to the $20-odd dollar M'soft mouse was a Logitech for $9.99. I just plugged it in and it's awesome. It's the V220 Cordless Optical Mouse for Notebooks. This one even has an on-off switch on the bottom. Woohoo! The M'soft one would only turn off if you plugged the usb dongle back into the bottom of the mouse.

This one even has left and right tilting wheel so sideways scrolling. I've been using it only about 10 minutes, but I think for the price, it's a superior mouse.

Microsoft 3000, baby!

I just picked up a Microsoft 3000 wireless keyboard and mouse. I didn't get the combo package, because the mouse that comes with it is huge. Instead, I found good deals at Target of all places, where I got the keyboard by itself, and got the M'soft 3000 notebook mouse, which to me feels like a regular sized mouse.

The keyboard is advertised as 'soft' but the keys are responsive and they click a little. It's a joy to type on. When I've hit a key, I know that I hit the key. There's no wondering, "Did I press it hard enough?" The feedback is great. I do wish the function keys weren't little buttons, but regular keys, but I'm getting used to it.

Years ago I had a M'soft keyboard and mouse, and then I found Logitech. I haven't been too picky about keyboards over the years, but man, I love a Logitech laser mouse. Anyway, it took a lot for me to switch to M'soft again. This keyboard and wireless mouse is a killer combo. I'm loving it. Way to go M'soft!

jQuery UI, portlets, cookies, and FireCookie

I've been playing with jQueryUI a little, and I like the portlet functionality. Basically, the user is presented with a number of widgets, like on iGoogle. The user can drag these around to rearrange them. What I wanted was to save the state so when they come back to the page, things are how they left them. I wanted to save the order in a cookie, and I stumbled upon the jQuery cookie plugin, which is pretty cool. I also installed FireCookie, which is an add-on to FireBug. Now I can watch the cookies change as I move things around on the screen. I'm in web developer heaven.

Here's a small demo video (no sound).

A reader asked for the code, so I've zipped up my Visual Studio project. It's just whatever I downloaded from www.jqueryui.com plus the jquery.cookies.js plugin. I made a new file under demos/sortable called portlet-tom.htm that has extra javascript to save the position of the portlets using cookies. Here's a link to the project files.