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For years I avoided getting a Mac in large part because, after having worked with Unix-flavored OSes for so long, living with a mouse that had just one button and no scrollwheel was just too annoying. (I actually carried my personal mouse to and from work last summer at HP because the mouse they gave me had no scroll wheel. Yeah, I probably should have just bought another mouse. Anyway.) Then I found out that you could use any USB mouse with the newer Macs; shortly thereafter I talked my advisor into getting me a Powerbook laptop, and my old PC desktop has now been retired in favor of a Power Mac.
Apparently Apple has finally realized that there really are a significant number of people that ditch the one-button mouse that Apples come with as soon as they open the box, and has introduced the Mighty Mouse. (No, I'm not kidding.) It's almost as featureless as their standard mouse, but it interprets clicks on the left side as, well, left-clicks, clicks on the right side as right-clicks, and so on. It also has a scroll ball that you can use to scroll horizontally as well as vertically (or both simultaneously). This is all pretty cool.
I'm wondering whether someone is going to create a hack that allows you to treat the scroll ball as the device that moves the mouse pointer (basically like one of those little "erasers" that IBM laptop keyboards have); I could imagine this being useful if your desk is crowded.
One question: if they've set it up so that left and right clicks are interpreted as they are, why not just give it left and right buttons?
I'm also wondering just how easy it is to scroll horizontally. Vertical scrolling, on a typical scrollwheel, is facilitated by the fact that your finger bends that way. Horizontal scrolling, it would seem, will require a less natural finger movement.
("Squeaked"? Yup. It apparently provides "audio feedback"--check out the right sidebar, at the bottom.)
Update: I finally got a chance to play with one yesterday. The "squeeze" buttons on the side apparently weren't connected to anything, so I didn't get to find out how that works. The scroll-nubbin was both impressive and disappointing: horizontal scrolling is easier than I expected, but you apparently can't scroll diagonally. (Or perhaps there's a setting that enables that.)
Apparently Apple has finally realized that there really are a significant number of people that ditch the one-button mouse that Apples come with as soon as they open the box, and has introduced the Mighty Mouse. (No, I'm not kidding.) It's almost as featureless as their standard mouse, but it interprets clicks on the left side as, well, left-clicks, clicks on the right side as right-clicks, and so on. It also has a scroll ball that you can use to scroll horizontally as well as vertically (or both simultaneously). This is all pretty cool.
I'm wondering whether someone is going to create a hack that allows you to treat the scroll ball as the device that moves the mouse pointer (basically like one of those little "erasers" that IBM laptop keyboards have); I could imagine this being useful if your desk is crowded.
One question: if they've set it up so that left and right clicks are interpreted as they are, why not just give it left and right buttons?
I'm also wondering just how easy it is to scroll horizontally. Vertical scrolling, on a typical scrollwheel, is facilitated by the fact that your finger bends that way. Horizontal scrolling, it would seem, will require a less natural finger movement.
("Squeaked"? Yup. It apparently provides "audio feedback"--check out the right sidebar, at the bottom.)
Update: I finally got a chance to play with one yesterday. The "squeeze" buttons on the side apparently weren't connected to anything, so I didn't get to find out how that works. The scroll-nubbin was both impressive and disappointing: horizontal scrolling is easier than I expected, but you apparently can't scroll diagonally. (Or perhaps there's a setting that enables that.)
