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Why Apple Makes a One-Button Mouse
IdiotOnMyLeft writes "There is a short article at Gear Live that tries to explain why Apple still sticks with a one-button mouse. It points out the fact that although it is perfectly possible to use a two-button mouse on a Mac for 7 years now, developers are forced to rethink their design approach and can't flood the right-click menu. No article of this kind would be complete without mentioning that users get confused with two buttons. There's a rumor that John Carmack once asked Steve Jobs what would happen if they'd put one more key on the keyboard."
developers are forced to rethink their design approach and can't flood the right click menu.
What? In a lot of applications, if you hold down the button, you get the equivalent of a right-click menu. How in the world does this restrict developers?
The coolest voice ever.
The reason they keep the one-button mice on the desktops is so that developers don't expect users to have multi-button mice.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If this is the last barrier, hesitate no more. Order a Mac, plug in the exact same mouse you've been using....and voila! It works exactly like it's always worked. No driver install or reboot required.
Even nicer than extra buttons!
SideTrack
SideTrack is a replacement driver for the Apple PowerBook and iBook trackpads. With SideTrack installed your standard trackpad becomes a powerful multi-button scrolling mouse.
Leave your external mouse at home and take full control over your trackpad:
Vertical scrolling at left or right edge of pad.
Horizontal scrolling at top or bottom edge of pad.
Map hardware button to left or right click.
Map trackpad taps to no action, left click, left click drag (with or without drag lock), or right click.
Map trackpad corner taps to mouse buttons 1-6 or simulated keystrokes.
Extensive control over accidental input filtering.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/12800Funny!? It's _true_. After my Mom started using a computer, it literally took her a year to get the left-click right-click thing down. She knew what I meant when I said left click or right click, but she would forget which did which, and still generally has to be told to give the right mouse button a shot when she's trying to figure out how to manipulate things in certain ways.
Ummm... the fact that there aren't six places defined as font locations in the OS. Also, the difference between Times, Times CE, Times CY, and Times.dfont makes me pull my hair out.
Typing in Cyrillic on WIn2K: Select Times New Roman, select Russian keyboard, start typing.
Typing in Cyrillic on OS X: Select Times, start typing, select Russian keyboard, see gibberish, select Times New Roman, start typing, see gibberish, scroll down to the bottom of the font list, find Times CY, start typing... Russian! Hurrah! Save that rtf and import it into InDesign... ugh. Gibberish. Open up FontBook, see that the installation of nothing but Office and InDesign, has left THREE DIFFERENT VERSIONS of TNR and FOUR of Times... all in different locations. Examine each font, and deactivate all of the identically named fonts that have glyph repertoires that don't include Cyrillic.
Phew.
Barring that, font handling in OS X is much easier.
$80? The Apple Mouse costs $29.00. The Apple Wireless Mouse costs $59.00. These prices come directly from the Apple Store online. I don't know where you're buying your Apple mice.
Here's what absolutely kills me here, folks. I think very few people at this point would argue that a one-button mouse is somehow more intuitive or user-friendly than a 2 button mouse. When using anything, ask yourself, "What's the meaning of what I want to do here"? With a two-button mouse, the left one is "select or execute", and the right one is "give me a choice of things that I could do with this object". With a one-button mouse, the latter option is gone, and users are left out in the cold. One Apple salesman once asked me if I "knew about" the Apple-click option, which would bring up the context menu. "Knew about"? This is about as ringing an endorsement of a user interface as "you'll get used to it after a while". By the way, Steve Jobs himself knew the superiority of the 2-button mouse when he put it on the NeXT cube back in friggin' 1988. Here is a picture of it, if you don't believe me. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =277&st=1
Apple, ship a damned scrollmouse with your computers, if you want people to switch. Everyone's used to it now, and your OS is designed for it. Stop this madness.
It works just fine, including the scroll wheel. Right-clicking brings up the context menu like Control-Clicking does with an Apple mouse. I'm using a Microsoft 2-button scroll mouse on my Mac mini right now.
I counted eleven mice on the apple store that have at least two buttons and a wheel (including the MS "S+arck" mouse). They also list a handful of tablets and trackballs, etc.
The cheapest mouse listed is $15.
Thank you come again!
.
Then Microsoft eventually adopted the mouse, and made the design decision they often do, that if one is good, more is better, and two-button mice became common. As GUI applications adopted contextual menus off the right mouse button, Apple adopted CMs via control-click. Now the complaint from Microsoft users was that Apple required you to keep one hand on the keyboard. (Assuming they didn't need two hands to use the mouse, I wonder what they needed the other hand for.)
One advantage to using the keyboard modifiers for the mouse clicks is that a meticulously designed application can provide visual clues about what will happen if a modified click is performed ahead of time. For example, when the Control key is down, Apple's Finder decorates the cursor with a small menu graphic to indicate the availability of the contextual menu.
Look, a user is not brain-damaged or deficient for not caring to remember the function of alternate mouse keys. A large number of users (probably 0% of the /. crowd) view the computer as an auxiliary device that's supposed to assist them at their Real Job while distracting them as little as possible with the need for special training and knowledge.
Even some of us who are power users and unafraid to learn non-intuitive gestures (I used to "fat-finger" bootstrap code into PDP-11 consoles using binary switches) are just as comfortable with a single-button mouse and alternative techniques to accelerate our work. It's neither better nor lamer; it's just another way of getting things done.
Finally, Apple is perfectly accommodating to those of you who prefer something other than what they offer as standard. If you prefer another mouse with 2, 4, or 7 buttons, the online store will sell you one, and the OS will support it. No, you won't get a credit for deleting the standard mouse (where offered), but last time I checked (three minutes ago), neither does Dell.
I've been using computers since the 80's. I've been using both 1-button (Mac) and 3-button (X Windows) for maybe 20 years now? I have a three button trackball on my Linux machine.
I'm not stupid. I play jazz piano and I can touch type. My fingers are usually under my control.
And I still push the wrong *@#$@$@#$ button a couple times a week when using X.
The X model is awful. It *pastes* when you click the wrong button. And since Unix is so terse and text-oriented, pasting is bad news.
The one-button mouse, combined with the control key in my left hand, is a simple and elegant solution that works for both power users and grandma.
Cripes, people who favor the one-button mouse aren't STUPID, they just don't want to waste brain cells. With the one-button mouse you just push with one or two fingers without thinking.
It's like having a gun with two triggers, one kills the person in front of you, the other serves them delicious ice cream. Yes, I'm sure a careful, intelligent person will usually do the right thing, and an idiot usually won't, but just the same I'd rather have the ice cream button somewhere else.
I know in Windows the risk of screwups is lower since it's just a menu that pops up, but I'm glad Apple sticks to a one-button mouse (specifically I'm glad that the *software* continues to wrk fine with one button).
If geeks want to flex their "muscles" on slashdot calling people like me mental defects, they can go right ahead.. as long as apple ignores 'em.
ok, you know a joke just isn't as funny when it has to be explained, but sometimes it has to be explained so the person whose head it flew over figures out no malice was intended...
For over 6 years, there has been a popular mac troll about a designer trying to copy a 17 meg file which is taking over 20 minutes on his PowerMac 9600 at work, and that the same thing would be done in 2 minutes on his 'old' 486 pc at home.
I seem to remember the troll containing the phrase 'an exercise in frustration' - so you see when the original poster used that phrase about use of the mac at work being an exercise in frustration, the reply of 'stop trying to copy that 17 meg file' is inherently funny - get it... it's *funny*, "stop trying to copy..."
oh, screw it, I give up...
Real world news: Not all memory is good. Apple-purchased memory always works. Store purchased memory sometimes doesn't. It costs a bit more, but it's reliable. Like everything Apple.
I use both Mac and PC. People who don't use Macs are just as silly as people who used VHS instead of Beta.
Or GM instead of Toyota. You get my drift.
Flame on, PC users that have never used a Mac... I use both and I know.
Doesn't take two hands on my iBook either. Little finger on CTRL and thumb on track-pad button is pretty fast and simple. Even two-handed, the other hand is on the keyboard anyway and I don't type while I'm right-clicking, so it's not exactly an issue.
In 99% of programs it does.
Actually, that works fine with a CTRL-click. Mac apps are designed to benefit from 2+buttons, but only require 1. It's a set-up I like because I find a 1-button trackpad more pleasant to use than a 2+ button one, but a 2+ button mouse even more.
You're looking for the software called Sidetrack.
This software lets you map hot corners on your trackpad, as well as scroll alleys. I've got a nice right click set up in the lower left corner, which works great for me. Several friends of mine use the scroll alley features, though it drives me nuts. I've been using it for several months on my Powerbook and it has changed my mousing experience entirely. I've got hotcorners for doing expose tasks like show all windows, etc. You can set them to do about anything you like.
Enjoy that.
Apple has been shipping a one-button mouse longer than anybody else currently in the computer industry has been shiping any kind of mouse.
In this matter, it's not Apple that's being different. They were here first.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Gee, that seems to be a Microsoft idea, too, although they don't say that context menu items should always be available as menu bar items:
as Apple does in the Apple Human Interface Guidelines:
The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines are somewhat less emphatic:
The KDE User Interface Guidelines don't have anything obvious on context/popup/shortcut menus.
On OSX you do multi-list selections with cmd-click. Because, unlike on Windows, the 'meta'-equivalent key actually does something useful aside from switch your app focus to the start menu.
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
There's a very good reason why Macintoshes have a single button mouse. Right-clicking just plain sucks as a user interface. You have no visual way of knowing what is right-clickable or not, and you have no clue what features will be available before you click. That is something you get to learn on your own, and that's certainly not a user-friendly interface. Remember that Mac OS has a long history of being intuitive and right-clicking is a geek thing. If you want to go the geek way, you can, as Mac OS X supports buttons-endowed mice, but it should not be that way by default for the beginner. It sucks even more on Windows as contextual menus only pop up once you release the button (makes absolutely no sense, isn't consistent with left-clicking, doesn't allow for mistake correction, etc etc), so at least it's done right on Mac OS X.
Moreover, with softwares properly designed at least, the options available under the right-click are also available in the menu bar, and have keyboad shortcuts.
So while you might disagree with using a single button mouse (I myself have bought a Logitech replacement), you have to agree that such choice does make sense and is consistent with Apple's politics regarding user interface.
Open the finder to your desired directory. Give the web browser focus. Drag and drop the image. works for non-finder windows like word documents too. Don't get me wrong, I use right-click but drag and drop is done single button and is intuitive as well for this purpose.
A few years back I did desktop support for a large organization. One user opened a trouble ticket on their new Windows workstation. Seems that they would click on an item and get a random menu. So I showed up at their desk and asked them to show me. He did.
"You're one of the guys who had their Mac replace by a PC, aren't you," I noted.
"Yea - I am. I wasn't happy about that. How'd you know?", he responded.
"Because you're pressing at the middle of the mouse right at the dividing line for the right and left mouse buttons. So you're actually randomly right or left-clicking."
"Oh. Ohhh... yea... I guess I am."
We had a good chuckle, and I closed the ticket.
> Left was Select, right was Menu, and middle was Adjust
Close -- middle was Menu and right was Adjust.
--Muzz
Umm, he's referring to the Windows key not doing anything useful. He never said that Windows can't do discontiguous selections.
That said, the Windows key does do a teensy bit more than just shift focus to the start menu, but not that much (I mostly just use Windows-M for Minimize All and Windows-F to bring up Explorer's Find dialog).
Actually, if you saw some early Apple tutorials on navigating the finder, double-clicking was never mentioned in them. They'd always tell the user to open a file from the Finder by single clicking it, then going to the "File" menu and choosing "Open."
Double clicking was an optional shortcut that has become common place.