When the Mouse is Not Mightier Than the Sword
I mentioned yesterday that I have a visiting iMac here fro evaluation, and so far I’m pretty impressed with the machine. Sure, it has a few quirks, but most are of little consequence.
The Mighty Mouse (shown at left), however, is more than a bit of an annoyance — an ergonomic nightmare, in my opinion. Sure, I can get used to the whole top of the mouse tilting to activate the single “mouse button,” and to the little clickable scroll bubble thing on top. What I can’t get used to is the pair of side buttons that launch the task switcher. Every time I do a click-and-drag operation, I end up l with a screen full of windows, and loose the item I’m trying to drag. Fortunately my good ol’ Microsoft optical scroll mouse works just fine, and gives me the added advantage of being able to right-click on something.
Of course, my favorite blogging to, Windows Live Writer doesn’t work on a Mac, so I’m seeing if there’s something else out there as good. I trying MarsEdit, and in this entry, Ecto. Neither are as nice, but they get the job done.
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Just poking around your site now. In case you’re still bothered by this, you can turn off the side buttons, or redefine what they do, in the system preferences’ keyboard and mouse panel.
I HATED that about the Mighty Mouse. I hate even more that they still (YEARS later) haven’t given a two-button option for their notebooks which are their best selling computers. They tout the dual-booting capability yet they do nothing to encourage power users to actually want one because you don’t have a secondary button in Windows or Linux.
So dumb. But it’s shiny, so it’s perfect, right? Seems to be the attitude.
- Jon
Most of the folks I know who use Macs (desktop or laptop) are not running Windows, even though they could, so I’m not sure it’s really an issue — even though most software developers are building in a “right click” menu these days.