joysticks

I bought this Powermate USB universal controller and installed it on my Dell running XP Professional. My initial reaction: Awesome, but a total waste of money. It is hard to give a low rating to something that looks so cool, but honestly, functionality and software make or break a product. I should have waited for improved software. As the other reviewers have articulated, it works great as an expensive pulsating brushed-aluminum volume control, but that's about it. [the price] for a pulsating volume control seems unreasonable.

Software: I wish Microsoft wrote the driver and software for this controller and created native messages (like the wheel mouse) for this so quality applications could be written. The software 1.4.1 is very hard to use and surely NOT what you would expect in the XP world. The downloaded driver is not signed for XP and XP pops the usual equivalent of "install at your own risk" warning along with the "older drivers may not work with XP". User interface needs a lot of work. It needs an Apply button badly. I thought it will be an excellent controller in the Microsoft (Visual .Net) development environment to switch between numerous documents I usually have open. I set it up to do that by using (Ctrl+F6 and Ctrl+Shift+F6) but, I couldn't get Ctrl+F6 to work consistently. Also, Powermate does not support key chording (e.g. Ctrl+K followed by Ctrl+P) a widely used feature in a number of Development environments, DV editors and keyboard intensive applications. The settings, user and computer actions could have easily been shown in a tree view so all are visible. The current user interface requires a lot of clicks to setup. The driver does not support multiple Powermates. The controller sends messages to the application's main window; it would have been a lot more useful, if they had sent it to the control with focus, similar to how the wheel on the mouse works. Powermate controller needs the rotary application launcher similar to what Sony sells with their jog control. It it very simple to write such an application, I wonder why it was not included.

Customer service: Professional and courteous; Replied to my question about multiple Powermates within a day.

So many people are probably baffled by this device. They think it is just a knob that does nothing but look cool, but these people are WRONG. You can do so much with this device. It has per-application settings, so you can have one setting for iMovie and another setting for the Finder, etc... You can have this device alter your sound volume, scrub through movies, perform commands. For example, you navigate through your iTunes library. The software is so open-ended, you can have a click simulate a key combo. The software even distinguishes between click and "long click."

I have a Wacom Tablet and just bought a powermate w/ the last drivers.It worked perfect with windows xp until i restart my computer.the powermate didn't work and i have to unplug and replug wacom to make powermate work.
Need a solution!