First they thought it was a good idea to ditch IBM and move to Intel. Well, many mac zealots thought hell froze over. Well, it looks like they threw in some more penguins and polar bears to go with it.
http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/
WTF?
sage for no bluetooth version
Needs more non-Mac OS compatibility.
Scroll ball looks easy to misuse.
All's well otherwise, though.
A review
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,122072,pg,1,00.asp
"Called the Mighty Mouse, the $49 USB device includes four buttons and a multidirectional Scroll Ball. It works with both Macs and PCs--though you lose some features when connected to the latter--and it's no more comfortable to use than older, one-button Apple mice."
"All that protrudes on the top of the mouse is the tiny white multidirectional Scroll Ball, which doubles as a third mouse button."
"You activate the fourth mouse button by simultaneously clicking the two buttons on either side of the mouse. These side buttons don't press in too deeply (you squeeze them more than push them in), and I found that I had to use a little more pressure than my hand would have preferred, particularly in repetitive situations. All in all, the Mighty Mouse's ergonomics didn't impress me."
"The Scroll Ball might be the Mighty Mouse's best feature if it weren't limited to Apple applications"
> The Scroll Ball might be the Mighty Mouse's best feature if it weren't limited to Apple applications
Huh? The Cocoa API's support three axes of scrolling (I have no idea what the third one is supposed to be). Well, I guess anyone implementing their own scrolling code might just simply ignore the X axis...
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/mightymouse.ars/1
7/10 -- When all is said and done, all of the the Apple PR on the Mighty Mouse product page is a bit much. As a poster in the Mac Ach succinctly observed, "this thing isn't as revolutionary as one may think. It's just nice to have an Apple mouse with a frickin' scroll button and right click."
Clicking both the left and the right buttons registers only a left click. Damn, that kinda reduces the game-ability of this thing...
Am I the only one in the world who actually preferred the old iMac hockey-puck to Apple's current optical honkers? I prefer small mice, and the hockey puck was simply diminutive.
No, the hockey puck was unusuable. I want to be able to rest my hand on the mouse, and there was no way to do that with the puck. It was incredibly uncomfortable.
I grasp my mouse lightly with my fingertips and slide it around by flicking my wrist, which is usually anchored to a single location on a wristrest. The larger and taller the mouse, the harder it is to do that, so I also prefer small mice. Better still if it's small and symmetrical.
>>7
Seconded. The hockey puck is fine if you do as >>8 suggests, but for a lot of people, it's simply not possible. If there's one thing I hate, it's dinky mouses. I expect to be able to hold my mouse and get some support and response. If I hold the hockey puck like that, the back-half of my hand has nothing to rest on. My fingers are also then too far forward. I have to curl them back so my fingertips can rest on the button.
Next complaint, it was fscking ROUND! I want to believe as much as you do that the wire makes it obvious which way the mouse was facing without looking at it, but it didn't. I couldn't just reach out and grab the mouse and know which way it'd move. If you just have a normal mouse-shape, you can grab it, and your hand will immediately sit facing forwards. It's not rocket science.
>>6 Actually, I believe the button behaviour is programmable. The Left+Right=Single left click is for people who don't know/care about the new functionality. They can just use it like the old mouse. I think they did the smart thing here.
It was round, yes... later revisions of the mouse had a dimple on the button that let you "feel" where the top of the mouse was, so that became a non-issue. But even before the dimple, I didn't think it was a problem. I'll admit that it was for some, though. At the uny lab I used to work at, sometimes somebody would come over and ask me for help, and when they would show me what they were trying to do, they would be moving the mouse left to move the pointer up. It'd turn out that they had been using the mouse sideways for the last hour or so and never bothered to try to figure out why it was working that way...
(If we could figure out why some n00b computer users are so tolerant of faults in their computer, maybe we could rid the world of the Windows virus forever...)
But anyway, I too am a "wrist-wrester" mouse user who finds moving a mouse around with my fingertips preferable to using my whole wrist.
As for Left+Right=Left, there doesn't seem to be a way around it; it seems to be inherent in the mouse itself, at least at this revision. Basically, one actual "button" registers a mouse click, at which point a sensor on the left button is polled to see if a finger is on it. If a finger is there, the click is a left click; if not, it's a right click. (There's also a sensor on the right button, but it seems to be ignored at present.) See: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/dissect.ars
One odd feature is the speaker in the mouse. I can imagine some creative "just 'cuz we can" hax coming out for it; play iTunes through the mouse or have it play Mickey Mouse sound clips when clicked and other nonce like that.
Yeah, it had a dimple, but I don't think it helped a lot. My point is that it doesn't fit into your hand definitively. you adjust your hand until it's right. With a proper mouse, it just goes on and "auto-adjusts" if you want to think of it that way.
I just remembered something else too. I use my wrist the most as well. If you move your entire forearm all the time, it gets tiring. My solution for you? Increase the mouse speed. Set it so that the area you can cover with wrist-only is the size of your screen. Easy.
This speaker in the mouse thing, I don't know. Seems mighty silly to me. Best you'll manage is mobile-phone-ringtone sort of stuff, so don't get too exicted yet. It just makes no sense, though. There's a spring there, and it makes the click. Why do you need an artificial click? Perhaps they're waiting for the day when the spring fails, and no longer makes a real clicking noise. Yeah, then we'll be glad they have the fake click. -_-
I'm not exactly sure what's going on for the left+right thing. It looks like it says "finger on left side => left click" when you hit both together, but I was under the impression that this was programmable behaviour. I can't say I've tested this thing yet, so I really don't know. I feel somewhat skeptical about the touch sensitivity thing, though. I like to rest my fingers on the buttons even when I'm not clicking. Unless you're gaming, it's too tiring to do anything else. If I have to raise my left finger when I want to do a right-click, this mouse is a failure.
I use a large mouse, and I turn up the mouse speed enough that I can just sit my hand down on the desk, resting on the mouse, and shift it slightly to move all the way across the screen without ever lifting my wrist.
Incidentially, I nearly gave up on the Mac right away because of one thing: Mouse acceleration that can not be turned off. Mouse acceleration completely destroys my normal mode of using the mouse, because it breaks the connection between distance moved on the table and distance moved on the screen, so you can no longer keep the mouse in one spot, but have to keep moving it around. And moving the mouse slowly makes it feel like it's stuck in mud. Mouse acceleration is utterly horrible, and I have no idea how you people put up with it. Luckily, I found a third-party program that could kill it off, making the computer actually usable for me.
I really don't see how somebody as user-centric as Apple would force mouse acceleration on their users. There's no way that can make the mouse easier to use.