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Mighty mouse not so mighty

Thursday, August 04, 2005

I got my Mighty Mouse in the mail today. First impressions are this thing was designed to make right clicking as difficult as humanly possible to encourage you to use it as a one button scroll ball mouse. Seriously I've been using two button mice since I got a Genius mouse for my ZX Spectrum, that's an awful lot of mousing experience, and I'll be damned if I have to lift my index finger to make a right click! Who ever designed this obviously isn't a two button mouse user, or has some very weird way of holding their mouse. Touch sensitive is the name of the game, if your index finger is so much as brushing the left side of the mouse it won't right click. How this passed any kind of usability testing beats me. My only remaining hope is that a software patch/hack will allow a click on both sides of the mouse to be registered as a right click. In fact after some experimentation even if my finger is hovering a millimetre above the surface of the left side of the mouse it won't right click. That's capacitve buttons for you, the ones on my Cinema Display exhibit the same behaviour. Also don't think the scroll ball works anything like a trackball. It's probably a software thing but it clearly does not allow 360 degrees of scrolling, It can scroll horizontally and it can scroll vertically. If you want to scroll in a circle expect to have to make a lot of separate horizontal and vertical scrolls. Due to the small size of the scroll ball you get a lot less scroll for your finger drag, you can of course make scrolling faster but then you lose accuracy. It feels a lot less solid than a scroll wheel and is quite squashy, easily moving up and down depending on the pressure you apply, but it doesn't generate a click unless you press a bit harder. If you think those nubs on ThinkPads look like nipples, this thing both looks and feels like one! It might just take some getting used to but it doesn't seem as well implemented as your average scrollwheel. Again is shrieks multi-button mouse newb about its designer(s). So if you're considering getting a Mighty Mouse because you want a multi-button mouse, don't. There are many, many alternatives out there which won't cost you a premium price and which don't have such anal design that they need touch sensors to guess what kind of click you're trying to generate. Seriously Apple this form over function crap is getting tiring, fancy design at the cost of usability and serviceability is BAD design.

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1 Comments:

At 4:30 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I bought a wireless mose at around the time the wired mighty mouse came out. I think I'll stick with mine as the 2 button issue sound annoying

 

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