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Apple Requires Three-Button Mouse for Shake 2.5

Posted by pudge on from the but-i-only-have-a-five-button-mouse dept.

SpillerC writes "The requirements for the newest version of Shake (cross-platform: Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, Irix) will require a three-button mouse on the Mac. Are there any other Apple-produced applications (Apple owns Shake) that require a three-button mouse? Will Apple release its own three-button mouse now?"

2 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Who cares, really? by webToy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I use Apple's ONE button mouse and works just fine. Control-click is not that hard, and if I wanted a two or three button mouse I would probably just buy one from Kensington...
    Is it really that big of a deal that Apple doesn't produce one of their own?

    1. Re:Who cares, really? by blukens · · Score: 3, Insightful
      But with macs. You have to CTRL + click.

      I think you, and others, are making a inaccurate assumption here. Unlike Unix or Windows, in a properly designed Mac application there should never be a time where an operation is accessable only through a context-menu. This is, you should never have to ctrl-click (or right-click) on anything.

      One of the core interface elements to the Mac environment is the unified menu bar. In many ways, it behaves like an omnipresent contextual menu. Switch from one app to another, it changes to reflect the new context. Within an application, items will enable/disable as they pertain to the currently selected object.

      For instance, in Windows it is very common to have a window without menu bar - like in an installer perhaps. If that window contains a text input element, and you want to access Copy and Paste commands (ignoring ctrl-key shortcuts) you have to get them from the context-menu. On a Mac, there will always be an Edit menu in the top menu bar, with those commands ready and waiting.

      The fact that Shake requires a 3 button mouse says to me that it is not a properly designed Mac app. That can be okay in some instances. Here, time to market was obviously an issue. And these types of professional apps tend to be an environment unto itself. You'll start the app at the beginning of the day and quit it when you go home, rarely switching between other programs. In such a case, having its own set of rules isn't quite as unforgivable. But I expect Apple to clean it up in time.