Cirque Corporation
|
|
Cirque Corporation is a United States based company which develops touchpad. Cirque was founded in 1991 by George Gerpheide and James O'Callaghan. Cirque sells their touchpads to OEMs under the brand GlidePoint. They also sell at least 3 models of stand-alone touchpads, available to consumers, branded both "Cirque" and "GlidePoint". Judging by the copyright notices on the documentation that came with mine, they have done so since at least 2000 AD.
Unlike Synaptics, Cirque blocks the features of their touchpad drivers depending on which model you buy. So for example, if you buy one of their cheaper touchpads, you will not have perhaps the zoom function, even though technically there is nothing stopping them from enabling the feature. Their features are also not as advanced as Synaptics, and they also have some basic problems, such as jumping cursors and not being able to perform a double click and drag (which will select text a word at a time). However they are the only people selling a USB touchpad at this time.
Their drivers are not Windows certified, and thus many users have complained of various problems, including:
- USB bus lockups and USB power surge errors reported by the operating system
- Their drivers also do not recognize new mice when they are plugged in. You must reboot Windows to add/remove mice.
- if the touchpad is disconnected from the USB port, that USB port cannot be used for any device until Windows is rebooted.
- Windows will not shut down properly. Windows shows the 'shutting down' message and will not proceed
- the cursor will 'shake' or 'jump', even when the finger is not moving on the touchpad
- the tap regions do not seem to coincide with the printed regions on the touchpad, causing confusion when the wrong command is executed
- when the driver 'ages' (ie a week from installing), regions of the touchpad will be either oversensitive (causing skips) or non-responsive (causing a pause during a smooth movement)
- sometimes, moving the cursor only works in one direction.
Cirque has been slow to respond to bug reports, with a new Windows certified driver originally promised by Jan 05. The date slipped without any announcement on their page. Currently the expected new driver were to ship by May 05, then June 05 according to support requests. However, there is currently no indication that any driver fixes are being worked on. The current driver is sill dated Feb 2003.
External link
- Cirque Corporation Official Website (http://www.cirque.com)