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Apple Developing Two-Button Mouse
An anonymous reader writes "Always the innovator, Apple is rumored to be developing a two-button mouse! Personally, I don't think it will catch on. Two buttons will be way too confusing for your average user." A few users noted a related Slashdot story from awhile back that discusses why Apple has historically avoided the two-button mouse. The article also mentions a revision to the AirPort Base Station with built-in optical audio.
Um, I believe he's had a Powerbook for a while now.
A minor correction - there will not be an optical out on the AirPort Base Station. The article mentions there may be in integrated optical out with new versions of the AirPort Express, instead of an external option.
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant
For what its worth, at least as far back as the first OSX release (possibly earlier, but I am Not an Apple User) you could use any 2 button mouse on a Mac... I have used them on Powerbooks and desktop machines running various versions of OSX.
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You'll want to unmap that button in Expose' first. That's trivially easy in the Expose' control panel in System Preferences, just select the "do nothing" option. Then you can run USB Overdrive, which I think can do that sort of button mapping, another nifty bonus is that you gain more flexibility in your mouse speeds and accelerations.
I got my 6 button mouse working on a mac with http://www.usboverdrive.com/ fine. I'll I want know is a similar app for windows, as I can only get 5 buttons to work how I want them:/
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
Wasn't NeXT the 1st computer to ship with a scroll wheel mouse?
No.
NeXT never shipped a scroll wheel mouse at all. Next used a 2 button mouse. By default the second button was identical to the first. The mouse preferences allowed the user to use the second button to display a copy of the application menu at the current cursor position. Which button (left or right) did this was user definable to allow lefties and righties to use the system comfortably.
I was a NeXT user for about 9 years before switching to Macos X. I don't really miss the second mouse button. The only aspect of the old NeXT/OpenStep experience that I prefer to Macos X is tear-off menus.
Actually, they already have this. It is a nice grey bezel box that overlays the contents of the (now frozen) screen with messages in a number of languages telling you that you now need to restart your computer. If things really go pear shaped you also get kernel error messages marching down the left side of the screen in white letters with black block background.
But people don't see these messages often, they usually mean something is wrong with hardware (most often memory).
You have an MX700, right? That is the only mouse Logitech has released in a pig's age that actually came with OS X drivers. None of Logitech's current offerings have been blessed in a like manner. I am still waiting--actually, I have long given up waiting--for drivers to their diNovo products. I guess they just don't want the business. Apple probably figures they might as well scoop up that market share since Logitech clearly sees no value in it.
On the other hand, Kensington has supported the Mac since the beginning and they produce great products. I will never buy another Logitech product again, but I have become a big Kensington supporter.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
As you can see on this page under "interfaces," the Airport Express already has optical out. What is the difference between this and what you're talking about?
Two Simple points
1) Most USB Mice work.
2) MSFT Intelli mice are nearly identical in price. You pay for quality. And yes MSFT mice are good quality, and work great with Mac's.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The airport express already has optical audio out. I picked one up last week and the the audio out is a dual purpose connector that works with a mini phono jack or with a mini SPDIF connector. I used an SPDIF cable I had from an old MD player with a similar connector and it worked great.
As you can see in the summary, Slashdot has already revealed its source. It's not reporting the information that is against the law, it's breaking the NDA or knowing who broke an NDA and refusing to identify them.
C'mon, you should know by now - stupid people have greater chances of breeding. This can be witnessed first hand by those who live in the midwest, watch the evening news and get to see which piece of methtrash got busted today for running a lab out of their house.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
You use your ms mouse. No thanks on my end! My scroll wheel needs to have some tactile feedback or I go insane. Most of the MS mice don't click when the wheel is used, or at least don't click hard enough. It's got to be a Logitech (MX510) for me. Though that costs money for quality too! :)
All modern macs have an eject button on the keyboard which ejects the superdrive. This is especially advantageous because you can't accidentally hit the button while carrying the computer and have the disk come flying out (which is exactly what would happen with my old dell laptop). they even designed it so you have to hold the button in for 2 seconds before the drive will eject so that you don't accidentally eject the drive if you miss the delete key.
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Well, you can have the iPod whell on a trackpad:
http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/
I am a happy iScroll2 user...
Roberto
What is even funnier, OSX offers better support for Microsoft's Trackball Explorer than WinXP. I bought the mouse for gaming purposes several years ago, and Win2k had a nice feature of binding keys like pgup/dn to the mouse buttons and this worked great in Quake3. Now WinXP binds vague "Forward" and "Home page" to the buttons, so IE understands, and Quake3 does not. In OSX the buttons are just Mouse1-Mouse5 and you can bind whatever functions you like, Expose, Quake, UT04 work just great...
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
The fact that Apple has supported multi-button/scroll wheel mice since MacOS 8.6 tells me that Apple was too enamoured of their decision to "keep things simple."
With the MX-500, you could make special button assignments in MacOS X that could make for vastly easier navigation of multiple windows, for starters.
If you know how to set up the button controls on the Logitech MX-500 mouse pointer (seven if you include the standard left and right mouse click or eight if you can use the scroll wheel as a mouse click button also), you can set up very powerful and customized window control functions that could be very useful for image editing and multimedia editing. You'd think that with the MX-500 be available from the Apple Store, Apple would get a hint that serious power users of the Mac would like a mouse with more than one button for customized navigation features.
Considering you can get a Logitech 6-button wireless mouse w/ scroll wheel for ~$28, I don't know why anyone would buy the Apple product.
:)
Not to justify $69, but the Apple one is Bluetooth, and works with a (built-in, if you prefer) Bluetooth dongle, rather than the Logitech's PS2/USB remote receiver dongle.
Minor point, but Apple users tend to prefer the aesthetics of not having extra bits plugged in everywhere
Mark
PS Cue dozens of people finding cheaper Bluetooth meeces now!
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This has nothing to do with the number of mouse buttons.
Fn: this is to activate options that would be separate keys on a full-size desktop keyboard. Every laptop I've ever owned, PC or Mac, has used something similar.
Ctrl: Same as the Ctrl key on PC keyboards, laptop or desktop.
Option: Macs have always had these; at some point they started including the "Alt" label to indicate the equivalent PC key.
Apple, usually called "Cmd", short for "command", by longtime users (that's what the four-leaf clover is, I don't know why): The most commonly used key on Macs, and again, it has nothing to do with the number of buttons on the mouse; it activates most keyboard shortcuts. Cmd-Q is quit, Cmd-C is copy, etc. The PC world has actually ripped this off twice -- first by mapping the standard Apple Cmd shortcuts to Ctrl, then by adding the Windows key, which apparently is kind of like the Apple key except it does something different in every program.
FWIW, I agree that mapping multi-button mouse options to $KEY + click is a pain in the ass, but the proliferation of keys really is a separate issue.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
One clarification for you - Apple's wireless mouse isn't "QuickRF"-based (like all the $30ish wireless mice), it's actually a Bluetooth mouse. Granted, non-Apple Bluetooth mice generally include a Bluetooth USB dongle as well, but $69 is pretty much in line with what I've seen most third-party Bluetooth mice sell for.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
You gain a lot by adding a second button. You gain contextual menus. By adding a 3rd button, you only gain half-assed alternative click actions in maybe 2/3rds of the applications out there.
IMHO, this is....misguided. You don't "gain" context menus, they're just slightly easier to access than they used to be (control-click). And OS X supports several GLOBAL functions for up to 5 buttons (maybe more, I'm not sure), including a really damn useful Expose ability.
Though here's hoping Apple ultimately wows us with something truly neat, like pressing down on the entire mouse engaging a grab-'n-pull functionality or something.
Oooh, I like that...
I tried it out in pre-development and it WAS insanely uncomfortable. No surprise it was never introduced.
No it absolutely did not.
The Lisa mouse is easily recognized by having a beige color scheme similar to the original Macintosh mouse, but with a different connector, a wider, shorter button, and somewhat different case styling.
This is a Lisa mouse.
The second mouse seen here is the original Macintosh mouse, IIRC.
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I will agree with most here-I swear by Logitech Mice. I don't mind their keyboards--but they don't make a cheap ergonomic board, so I get the MS one that's about $29.
So, for all of my personal computing needs, its a Logitech mouse!
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Interesting that you and the previous poster got into computing around 1985 or so. You missed the dreaded "don't forget ctrl-C before removing the floppy or you will ruin it" curse in CP/M. Fixing this was the one great improvement MS-DOS 1.0 had over the older system.
This was done by changing all disk operations from "write back" to "write through" (to use cache terms). Unfortunately, the cost is a reduction of several times in disk performance as the head constantly moves back and forth between the middle of the floppy (where the file is being accessed) and the first tracks (where the FATs are). This allows you to yank out the disk at any time with a very low probability of damage and also makes it likely that you will still have your data after a power failure.
For the floppy-only 128KB original Mac it is likely that this loss in performance would have been unacceptable. So Apple selected a "write back" scheme and prevented you from removing the disk without telling the software first so it could save all of its buffers. For the rarer case of a power failure the file system stored redundant information which the built-in disk repair utility could use to make up for any unsaved data.
Here is the story of how they got that cloverleaf symbol.
This was so people could transfer files directly from one floppy disk to another, by dragging files onto the shadow disk; the Mac would then ask you to insert the disk you took out. An important capability in computers without hard drives.
One problem with this was that, if you tried to open a "shadow disk", it would pop up a dialog box saying "insert disk <whatever>", which would prevent any other action, and which had no button to cancel it. You could close the window with Command-. (the usual Mac means of cancelling things) but that was not stated in the window. That was an interface problem.
The Win Key isn't used for contextual actions. That'll be the context menu key, which is used by about 3 people in the universe.
... sorry .. and OT at that!)
The Win key is oddly under-used. There's a few notable uses (Win+D - show desktop, Win+E open Explorer, Win - show start menu). I've yet to see it do anything particularly useful.
On the Mac, Command (the Apple Key, or the 'Splat' key) is the 'do something' key. Cmd+H - Hide this app. Cmd+O (in Finder, and most apps) open, Cmd+S save, etc. Basically the Win equivalent of Control.
Option is a modifier, most often used to slightly alter the behaviour of a Command+[something] shortcut. For example, Cmd+I in Finder shows the Get Info (Properties for Win folk) panel. Cmd+Opt+I shows the Inspector. If Get Info is the Mac equivalent of Properties, the Inspector is a variant of the Properties window that dynamically updates based on the current selection.
For those who have access to a Mac, try dropping down a menu and tapping the Option key. The menu options will toggle between their standard and alternative uses.
The Control key's a bit of an oddity on the Mac. Its use is largely app-specific. It's not all that often it's used as menu or dialog shortcuts.
Having used Windows in all its variations since Win 3.11, and a Mac since 2001, I've got to say that I find the Mac's approach rather more elegant. Not to say that it's perfect -- some GUI navigation's a bit half-assed (i.e. no direct equivalent to Windows's Alt+F (file menu) S (save)). But that's largely mitigated by the consistency and utility of standard shortcuts.
(phew, quite a rant
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
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If Apple offered a choice of a two button (+scroll wheel) and a three button mouse, we can put to rest one of the biggest misperceptions of Macs. This one button only philosophy from Apple has hurt its image among potential switchers for a long time. Its been with Apple's image so long that it has left an indelible impression of being not a serious computer by many who are unexposed or uninformed about other platforms. Imagine if Sony came out with the Playstation 3 with a joystick that had a single fire button like the Atari 2600. With a cursory glance kids would dismiss it as lame game console and make fun of those who owned one, even though it is using a revolutionary processor like Cell.
I've only recently started to endorse the use of Macs in my department in the last two years when Mac OS X looked promising and ready in Jaguar ver 10.2 . One of the obstacles I faced was the myth of the one button mouse and I wish I didn't have to go through that argument every single time, because it gives me less time to show other really powerful and cool features of Mac OS X. Imagine how this must waste the time of every single Apple sales rep or individual that is trying to introduce a Mac to a potential switcher. If Apple still wants to offer a one button mouse and make it the default choice thats fine. What irritated me was the lack of choice from the Apple Store. A person can change the memory, CD/DVD drive, harddisk, remove the internal modem on PowerMacs but you where always stuck with the same old one button mouse.
What happens in my department is that the one button mice don't get used much and I have to spend extra money on getting a multi-button optical mouse. I'm sure everyone has their anecdotal story of how a user with a multi-button mouse didn't understand how to use left or right mouse click. I have my own where a 86+ year old professor had a hard time with the multi-button mouse I switched him to because his hands are quite shaky. For the rest of my department 99% of them seem to be able to handle a multi-button mouse just fine.
If you have Apple Shake or Alias Maya you MUST have a three button mouse. This is Apple's own software that requires it, so why has it taken so long for Apple to offer a real "choice" for its consumers is beyond me, because this policy in my opinion has done harm to sales and put plenty of potential Mac buyers off. Sometimes there seems to be a culture of stubbornness with in different divisions at Apple. Like they know what is best for you. Take for example the infamous puck mouse which by ergonomic standards failed the test. It was released for 3 product cycles before Apple finally changed it to its current form. The overwhelming feedback it got and reviews of the mouse should have made Apple change it after its initial release, but in the face of plenty of criticism they bore it. I bought a cheap plastic device called iCatch for those puck mice back then to solve the problem. When Apple bought NeXTStep they brought in many new ideas, but the one thing that they kept was the one mouse button ONLY policy from the old Mac days. I'd rather see Windowshade, Tabbed Folders or NeXT shelf, customizable Apple Menu come back and see the one button mouse leave as the ONLY choice. For user base who love their one button mouse Apple should keep offering this mouse. These are the legacy users and its important to support them. Many Apple migrants come from Windows, Unix, Linux and other platforms and its about time we see this change.
Many scientists, researchers and scientists use X11 on Mac OS X and its essential to have a three button or two button (+ scroll wheel) mouse. I use a five button Kensington Optical Elite and programmed buttons 4 and 5 to use Expose functions. It makes my desktop experience my easier with these powerful features.
I can only hope that news is true and it would only help Mac sales, but they would need to market multi button mouse for a few months to undo all those years of misperception.
The keyboard command you need is:
Command + Colon
or, if you prefer to think of it like this:
Command + Shift + Semi-colon
This is a little OT but if you're thinking about getting a Mac don't bother with the bluetooth mouse. It's very sluggish. Originally I bought their bluetooth mouse and it was horrible. I returned it and got the Logitech MX700 bluetooth optical mouse. It was better but it's not nearly as solid as a wired mouse. At least not compared to a wired mouse in windows. I have to run out and buy a usb mouse for my Mac mini. So at least I hope the problem is the fact that it's bluetooth.
I don't speak much Finnish either, but I do know some, so:
You can predict a man's success among women by his computer
Mac: sought-after bachelor
Brand PC: normal guy
Custom built: to be avoided
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Don't forget that the option key can also allow one to easily type non-English characters. Like.
opt-a = å
opt-e (accent) a = á
opt-n (tilde) a = ã
opt-' = æ
opt-u (umlat) a = ä
opt-c = ç
opt-o = ø
opt-s = ß
opt-/ = ÷
And the list goes on and on...
And just as a note, before someone states how stupid a Mac is that we have to use opt-e/opt-n for accent/tilde rather than the single-quote/tilde ('/~) key. We do have those keys on a Mac and they are fully functional, but the opt variants are modifier keys. This means it will "modify" the next letter, e.g. "opt-n" will set the tilde modifier then pressing n again will give the ñ character (n with a tilde). Of course this only works if such a character exists since it's only a mapping to a character code, e.g. opt-n o works (õ), but opt-n g doesn't (g).
"And now you shall learn the secret of boot to the head"
Actually, though, the one-button mouse has been popular at Apple because it appeals to one particularly influential group of *power* users--namely, graphic designers. Many designers find the large single button superior because it permits a more natural hand position. The single button also promotes better interface design, as developers make sure to keep all commands accessible in visible locations. Contextual menus are great, but their commands should be redundant.
The rest of your post is entirely correct. Steve Jobs actually happens to be a fan of the two-button mouse. That's why OS X has always included robust support for two-button mice and why (for example) NeXT computers came standard with multi-button mice.
every Mac application I have, that will open file->save or save.
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