Mightymouse

Saturday, August 6, 2005 » general thought

I was at the Apple Store earlier today to pick up a dock for das iPod, but I had a second objective: Test out Apple's new Mighty Mouse.

I have to admit, when they announced it on Tuesday I was unusually excited about it. (Probably that was just my Apple fanboy side taking over.) I mean, it sounded too good to be true: Finally, a [pseudo] two-button mouse, designed with Apple's interface sensibilities. And imagine, a 360° scrollwheelball! And... some buttons on the side! That press in, or something! I was very optimistic.

I made my way over to the display model at the front of the Apple Store. This mouse is going to revolutionize my computering, I thought. I reached down and placed my hand upon it, my middle finger already anticipating scrolling around immense Photoshop windows with ease. Then I clicked, and nothing happened.

Of course, it was a right-click, so I assumed the Apple Store staff just hadn't yet configured the brand new mouse. Unfortunately, checking the system preferences proved me wrong. It turns out that, despite everyone touting the Mighty Mouse as a multi-button device, it's really still just one giant button. And if your finger isn't over the precise part of the mouse that triggers the right click, it interprets it as a regular left-click. In order to reliably trigger the right-click, i had to move my hand up so my middle finger came pretty much to the upper edge of the mouse, which was uncomfortable. There also seemed to be a delay in the speed at which I could right-click; trying to do so twice quickly would produce a right-click and then a regular click.

Then there's the scrollball. My first impression was: TINY. It took many more revolutions than a typical scrollwheel to scroll through a document. You could probably fix this by turning the tracking up, but at the cost of valuable precision. The 360° scrolling also disappointed, because it wasn't truly 360°. That's probably more the fault of the application I was using (Preview; they didn't have Photoshop on the demo unit) or the OS. Maybe in a future update they'll improve scrollball support.

Finally, there were the side buttons, which were configured to show the desktop (via Exposé) when squeezed. That could be handy, but I could take it or leave it. F11 works fine for now.

So, round 1 with the Mighty Mouse: Pretty disappointing. I'll hold out for v2.

And seriously, Apple, pick a new name.