[Cross posted to and …]
Click for more moblog photos…
I’ve been wanting a new mouse for a while, so when Apple announced the Mighty Mouse this morning, I ran out to the store to grab one. And boy am I glad that I did… It’s really nice.
First off, I called as soon as the Apple store opened, and was told that they have some of the mice, and they are being unpacked while I talked to the person. Based on that, I was assured that there would be some when I arrived later. Well, once I got to the Apple store, it turns out that they had received just enough for in-store display, but none to sell. Fortunately, because I called the employee had set one aside for me. Woo!
After I got back to my desk I plugged the mouse into my PowerBook. It turns out that the drivers for it aren’t included with OS X 10.4.2, so by default it’ll just have the right/left/scroll functionality. After installing the driver, you get this addition to the Mouse section of the Control Panel applet. Settings default to make it act as a slow moving, slow scrolling one button mouse where the side buttons activate All Windows in Exposé.
I changed the settings to be a left/right buttoned mouse and left everything else as is. All the buttons can be set to any of a suite of standard tasks, or they can activate ‘Other’, which allows you to select any Application on your machine. This could be really, really handy…
Now, the feel of the mouse. The mouse maintains the idea where the entire body rocks downward to click. And yes, the mouse still makes a resounding CLICK sound when clicked. There are proximity sensors under each side of the tip of the mouse. If your finger is over the left side when you click, you get a left click. Right side works the same way. If you have a finger over each side and click you just get a left click. As I personally tend to use my left and middle fingers for clicking, this will take some getting used to, but it’s not a big deal.
The scroll ball is rather nice. It’s a slightly firm, smooth rolling trackball about the size of a small pea. It makes no noise when moving, and it’s hard to tell if it’s turning or just sort of rocking to the side. This ball actually works out surprisingly well for scrolling and I took to being comfortable with it almost right away.
Yes, there is a speaker in the mouse which makes an almost ratcheting sound when scrolling, but it’s barely audible — even less so than the mechanical CLICK of the Microsoft mouse that I’m moving from. Additionally, if one clicks down on the ball — which is actually pressing it down which in turn clicks the body of the mouse — a ‘middle click’ is sent. This happens regardless of where one’s other fingers are over the sensor. This works really well as well.
The side buttons for ‘squeezing’ the mouse work out pretty well, too. Ever since I saw the original whole-body-click Apple mouse, I thought those side lumps should do something. Now they do… They don’t move, or really even flex perceptibly, but they do work out well. One also has to make an effort to position their fingers over them and squeeze them, so it’s unlikely that they will be activated accidently.
All in all, this seems like a really great mouse. I’ve taken to being immediately comfortable with it. This should definitely work out well at home.
I haven’t tried it with Windows yet (Windows compatibility is listed on the box) but I can’t imagine it would work much differently…
So, all in all, I have to say that this is a pretty nice product, and a distinct improvement on Apple’s normal one-button mouse while still keeping the original slick look and feel.
