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Apple's philosophy of elegant interface design has encountered a hiccup.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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Is nothing sacred any more? Apple's got a multi-button mouse


Aug. 10, 2005


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard

   Apple has a new mouse. It costs $50 and has a slick all-white design, just as you'd expect from the company that brought us the iPod and the iMac G5.
   In keeping with Apple's impish nature, it even has a cool-but-silly name: Mighty Mouse.
   But this isn't just any mouse. It's a mouse with more than one button. It has two buttons on top along with a scroll ball -- like a scroll wheel that rotates in any direction. And it has other buttons on each side.
   If you're not an Apple enthusiast, you might be wondering why that's a big thing. After all, two-button mice are as common as pollen, and a mouse with a scroll wheel and extra side buttons is nothing unusual.
   Ah, but it's the Big Kahuna of life-changing moments for Apple. You see, Apple never made a two-button mouse before. Or one with a scrolling doodad. Or one with buttons along the side. Nothing but a single-button, you-can't-press-the-wrong-thing kind of mouse.
   Until now.
   I used to make fun of this. It was an easy target. What stoopnagle would sell a modern computer with an ancient no-choice mouse?
   But all that is history. Apple's philosophy of elegant interface design has encountered a hiccup.
   You see, having only one button to press cuts out nearly all confusion over what you should do with an object on the screen. You click it. Or double click it. Usually, that's the only choice. (Not always, though, as you'll see shortly.)
   Each additional button on a mouse adds confusion, according to Apple's own guidelines. Which button should you press to get a pop-up menu? Which one to press to rename a file? Having only one button cuts through that muddle nicely.
   And Apple even found a way to add a secondary function to a single-button mouse. In OS X, holding the button down for longer than a half-second causes secondary menus to pop up in many cases. When you do this on an icon in the dock, for example, you get a contextual menu. (It also shows up with a Ctrl-Click.)
   Why Apple suddenly decided a multi-button mouse was OK isn't hard to guess. Many Windows users are eagerly switching to Macs, and Steve Jobs apparently figured it was time to remove one of the last oddball aspects of the Mac. Macs look better than PCs, run better and last longer, sure. But what about that funny mouse? It was clearly time for the single-button mouse to make way for a more familiar rodent.
   So that's what's happened. Apple's design team didn't let us down in the gee-whiz area -- the mouse looks like it has no left or right buttons at all (they're hidden in the shell) and it even works just like a single-button mouse if you change some of the settings. (With the appropriate change, pressing either button is the same as a single left click.)
   The side buttons can be set up to do all kinds of things, and the scroll ball is a much better idea than a scroll wheel.
   You might like it. I'm not sure. I wish Mighty Mouse was wireless, for one thing. I'm addicted to my Microsoft wireless Intellimouse mouse, which fits my hand better than Apple's Mighty Mouse and runs for months on an cheap pair of batteries and has no cord to get in the way.
   But if Apple could make a wireless version, I might change my mind, mostly because Apple's Mighty Mouse is far better looking than my hulking Microsoft model. Style is more important than we might think.