Mighty Mouse
With my new computer I got a wireless Mighty Mouse.
Firstly, wireless is the Right Thing for a mouse. (I got a wireless keyboard, too, but the difference is less noticeable; just a bit less cable clutter.) Being able to pick it up and walk off is a bit weird but without the cable it feels much more free.
The scroll ball is much less awkward than any scroll wheel I've encountered; I've not once accidentally produced a scroll when I wanted to middle-click. The target area is a little small for clicking, which might be an issue for some people; what would be nice is if the area around it functioned as a middle button too. The horizontal scrolling is handy; in retrospect it seems a sufficiently obvious extension to the idea of a scroll wheel that I'm amazed no-one's tried it before.
I tried the 360° scrolling in Lightroom but even when it worked it was rather juddery. Perhaps this is a software problem, in which case we can hope for future improvements; as a nonworking new feature, rather than a missing standard feature, it doesn't seem like much of an immediate loss, but don't buy on the basis of this feature until you've seen it working properly!
The side button (two buttons, but you squeeze them to make a single click) is a good idea but it's not really sensitive enough - you have to squeeze quite hard to get it to do anything. Given it's a natural place to hold the mouse I can see that there's a need to avoid false positives but some kind of sensitivity adjustment might have been a good idea. The default mapping to Exposé seems sensible, though I still find I use a hot corner more because you need to squeeze so hard.
Where it really falls down though is the right button. In theory it's supposed to spot when your pressing on the right hand side rather than the left hand side; in practice this seems extremely unreliable - earlier today I demonstrated to Naath three consecutive clicks without moving my finger of which the first two were interpreted as left button and the third the right button.
Power-cycling the mouse seems to help a bit but not permanently and, sheesh, you shouldn't have to reboot a mouse! I can seriously see this driving me back to my trackball (a Kensington Expert Mouse, which is excellent if obviously misnamed), which would be a shame, as apart from this it's a pretty good mouse.
Tags: geek, mac, reviews
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