Apple - Mighty Mouse

Just got an Apple Mighty Mouse (multi-button Apple mouse aka fourth sign of the apocolypse) and all I can say is...

meh.

Before I had this mouse hooked up I had two different mice for my G5. I started with the standard Bluetooth one button mouse. Playing WoW with a one button is untenable so I procured a two button M$ scroll mouse. Both of those optical mice tracked on the table my Mac sits on. The Mighty Mouse doesn't. I need a mouse pad under it. Blech... so 1997.

Second the buttons... or actually lack thereof. This is a "two button mouse" but Apple outcuted themselves and the mouse appears to have only one button and a scroll doohickee (had to lookup the technical term for that one... it's not a wheel but it does scroll... it's more like the "eraser mouse" on some laptops). The trick is the surface of the mouse is touch sensitive. Click on the left hand side of the button you get a left click. Click on the right hand side of the mouse and you get a right click... in theory. The problem here is that when I mouse, I leave my pointer finger permanently on the left button and my middle and ring fingers on the right. I click the right button with my ring finger and use the middle for scrolling. Being touch sensitive with my big paw all over it the Mighty Mouse interprets my right clicks as "all button mash" which it helpfully defaults to... a left click. To get a right click I actually have to lift pointer finger off the left side of the mouse. I know that sounds a lot like George Jetson complaining about how many times he had to push the button that day, but it is incredibly annoying and after an hour of mousing I have a sore pointer from lifting it awkwardly off the mouse.

The side buttons are nice. OS X has a kick ass window manager feature called Expose. By default if you drag your mouse outside the top left corner of the screen the "All Windows" feature of Expose activates and the desktop "zooms out" and all your open windows are tiled on the screen. Left click on the one you want and it zooms (literally) to the front. It's the only app-switcher faster than "alt-tab" (ok openapple-tab) I've seen. By default the side buttons activated this feature. That's cool. What's not so cool is there are "two" side buttons, but there really aren't. There's a button on each side of the mouse, but they both do the same thing. It's one button, and there's no way to make the left side button do something different than the right.

The scroll doohickey works pretty. My complaint here is more form the function. Normally I scroll with my middle finger, but this doohickey works more like a laptop eraser mouse and I need to use my pointer finger as my middle is not dextrous enough to control the pointer. Once you actually get scrolling, it's sweet. I can see real uses for this thing for graphics people. To quote Eazy-E "I got front and back and side to side." You really can scroll around in circles, diagonally, whatevs, so for working with large images I can see some potential for this scroller. Now if they'd just put it in a better mouse.

So the final verdict is ick. Cool scroll thingee and it nice to have Expose available from anywhere on the screen, but go get a $29 M$ five button jobby for your Mac if you need a multi-button mouse (and you do).