How Mac OS X is Changing the Mac Community

rgraham writes "Derrick Story (O'Reilly Network editor) has written a follow-up article to The New Mac User, titled The Changing Mac Community. He makes some interesting observations about how Mac OS X's Unix underpinnings have greatly 'broadened the landscape' of the Mac community beyond that of typical artists to now include hardcore Unix users and the like." I personally believe this is the single most important component to Apple's continued success for the near future.

Comments

Re:Me and a Mac

[Graff]

However, my new employer uses mostly Macs with OS 9 (many of our apps don't work in OS X classic mode). I've found that if you're actually using Mac OS and you slap a nice 4 button USB mouse on there, the extra mouse buttons really don't do you much good, since the OS is more-or-less designed for only one button. Hence, there isn't anything for the extra buttons to do.

You can fix that easily. Go to VersionTracker and download USB Overdrive. The link is for the MacOS X version, but there is also one for MacOS 9 and earlier. The MacOS X version still in beta but it works very well and has no bugs that I know of. What it does is it allows you to set each button on a USB mouse or joystick to do one of many different actions such as double clicks, triple clicks, activating things, etc. It's a totally great utility.

That being said, there is really very little reason for non-power users to have more than one button on a Macintosh. You can do everything on the operating system with a one button mouse and even where a right-click would help you, all you have to do is to control-click instead. The main reason I have a different mouse is for the scroll wheel. If Apple came up with a one-button scroll mouse I would probably be very happy just using that.

Personally, I think the mouse should be one of the build-to-order items. Have the standard Apple mouse be the base item and allow the user to upgrade it to different ones like a 3 button with scroll, a trackball, wireless mice, etc. More choice is better in my mind.