Journal Entry

:: Griffin Technology Is Great ::

The short version: Griffin Technology has wonderful customer support by phone; they’re very generous and nice. There is a conflict between the PowerMate driver and USB Overdrive that can be stopped by in the USB Overdrive control panel, and older PowerMates that slide around on your desk just need a little cleaning to work great again.

Read on for the longer version.

A few years ago, I bought a PowerMate from Griffin Technology. It’s a slick-looking glowing, twistable knob/button that can control functions on your computer. Out of the box, you can turn it left or right to turn the sound volume up or down, scroll documents in TextEdit or Word, eject CDs, and more. They’re not expensive, and really nifty looking, so I bought one. At that point I only used a laptop, and didn’t sit at my desk all the time, so I found I wasn’t using it very much. When we moved, I packed it up, and didn’t take it out of the box until last weekend. I have an iMac now, so I thought I’d get it out and start using it again.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work. The blue light came on, I could see in the system profiler that the Mac was aware that it was plugged in, but that was it. Around the time when I bought the PowerMate, I spoke with someone from the company on the phone, and they were quite friendly and human, so I decided to call them instead of sending an email. The woman I spoke with was just as friendly as I remembered, and after trying out a few things, she offered to send me a new one, free of charge. They’ve updated the firmware a couple times (mine is version 3.21, new ones are at version 4), and she thought there was a chance the older firmware wasn’t working with the newer machines.

The new one arrived today. I tore open the package, plugged it in, and… nothing. Or rather, the same behavior. Then I remembered something we hadn’t checked: I use USB Overdrive to make all the buttons on my Microsoft mouse work, and the PowerMate is another USB device that Overdrive can handle. So I uninstalled Overdrive, and lo, the PowerMate started working again. Of course, now my mouse didn’t work as before (no double-click when I press the scroll wheel, several buttons doing nothing — unacceptable!). Fortunately, I found that you can tell USB Overdrive to ignore particular devices. PowerMates show up as “Joystick” in USB Overdrive, so just clear the “Overdrive Enabled” checkbox for Joystick, and the PowerMate will work. This was good.

But now I had two PowerMates. That’s fun, but I didn’t want to scam the company out of a product, and figured they should probably know about this USB Overdrive issue. So I called them back, explained what I’d found, and asked if they wanted me to return the PowerMate. No, they told me, you can just keep it. Sweet! As you can see from the photo above, I have one of each finish. The black one is the older one — they only come in brushed metal now.

This only just happened, so I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with them. I think it could be cool to use them both for scrolling around in large documents; or use one for zooming in Logic, the other for scrolling. I look forward to trying this out. One thing I noticed was that the new one stayed put on my desk more reliably than the older one. That was easily solved by cleaning off the bottom of the older one. I breathed on it and wiped it with an old dryer sheet (I keep these on my desk for dusting), and it’s nice and tacky again.

Griffin Technology seems to be focusing much more on iPod products these days, which makes sense. We have an original iTrip for our ancient, gasoline-powered iPod, and it continues to work fine. Griffin is a small company that seems to be doing things the right way. I’ll continue to support them.