Nicholas Helke
nhelke@gmail.com

Magic Mouse

23 October 2009

First off I would like to say I disapprove of the name. I also disapproved of the name Mighty Mouse. Somehow both names strike me as being more Disney or Pixar than Apple.

I like the new Mouse. I would have ordered one already except for the fact it lacks a couple of important pro features. That said, with a bit of luck Apple can fix them with firmware/software.

This being an Apple mouse there is no secondary click, that is until you activate it in the System Preferences, but once you’ve done that, the secondary click on the Magic mouse works as expected. There is one glitch. A glitch which I am sad to say already plagued the Mighty Mouse. You cannot both right and left click at the same time. This is only a problem when operating the rocket launcher in Unreal Tournament, as far as I know.

The fact that it doesn’t have a third button—you know the one when your click the scroll wheel—is more of an issue. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the whole mouse is scroll wheel or surface and a cool one at that—I particularly like the momentum effect when scroll—just like on the iPhone. A solution to the third click could be to map clicking with two fingers on the mouse to a third button.

One feature the mouse has, but which I found hard to operate was the two finger left-right swipe to navigate back and forward. This equates to the three finger swipe on an Apple trackpad—isn’t it odd that Apple would be inconsistent. I never like this gesture or feature and am pleased to report that this feature can be turned off.