I must say that I am pretty impressed with Apple’s Magic Mouse. It’s sleek, with a good 3/5 of it’s surface being available for multiple-touch functions. Being made from aluminum, it’s sturdy, solid feeling, and clicks like you would expect a mouse with real buttons.
Unlike the “Mighty Mouse”, when you click and drag with the Magic Mouse, it doesn’t feel like you are trying to hold the mouse so that the ‘whole mouse button’ doesn’t release.
Also a great feature of this mouse is that when you scroll windows by sliding you finger down or up the center of the mouse, you can tell the Mouse Preference Pane to glide just like you were flicking your finger across the iPhone/iPod touch’s screen.
There is also a great $5 shareware program called MouseWizard that adds all kinds of great functionality to the multi-touch abilities of the Magic Mouse.
MouseWizard is a great supplement to the System Preference Mouse Pane. It’s a program that can reside in the MenuBar, Dock, or both, not in System Preferences, so it won’t conflict with Apple’s Mouse Preference Pane.
The Menubar items include battery status, 3 settings entries as well as the standard application menu items.
MouseWizard lets you set tapping instead on clicking the mouse for both the right and left clicks. Two finger gestures include: Middle Click, Fourth Click, Scroll Up, Scroll Down, Swipe Left, Swipe Right, Zoom / Shrink. Three finger Click and Whole Hand Click. All can be configured to do one of many functions:
I’m currently waiting for a D-Link DBT-120 Wireless Bluetooth 2.0 USB Adapter from Amazon to hook it up to my Mac Pro. When I purchased the beast 3 1/2 years ago, I didn’t see the need to have Bluetooth and WiFi in the box. I now realize that I should have configured the order with both. A hindsight… Apple has tested their wireless keyboards and mice with the D-Link adapter which is why I ordered it rather than the many others to choose from.
Back in the days of the Mighty Mouse, I would never have suggested to anyone to use it. With the Magic Mouse, I have to say that so far, I have to problems suggesting the mouse. Mind you, I have only just started to use it, and there might still be some issues with both left and right buttons down in games. However, what I have seen so far is darn amazing and I’m very pleased I got one.
Dave M.
February 10th, 2010 at 4:39 am
Thanks for the tip on MouseWizard. I love the Magic Mouse. The only thing that has marred the experience for me is not having a “middle click” which I use for opening links in a new tab (Command-click does this in most Mac browsers).
Hopefully MouseWizard can be configured to accomplish this for me. That would be worth at least $5!
February 10th, 2010 at 8:15 am
Yep, it does. Though, I’m not all that sure what the difference between the “Middle Click” and “Middle Click (Graphics)” is.
I hear you about the middle click with browsers. I use that all the time with my existing mouse (Microsoft Mouse) and couldn’t live without it. I hate having to remember to hold the command key down to do the same thing.
I’m surprised that the Mouse Preference Pane doesn’t have something that lets you set a Middle Click for the Magic Mouse. The Mighty Mouse with it’s little tiny mouse trackball let you middle click with it.