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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.
Why would Apple design a 2 button mouse? Is that not insane? Wouldn't it make more sense to design at least a 3 button mouse with a wheel? What would really be gained by simply adding a second button?
I picked up an Apple Wireless Mouse and found that it was good enough for everything... except reading long pages. I'd rather have a scroll wheel than another button: the usefulness of the scroll wheel would far exceed having another mouse button.
Luckily, I have a lot of multiple button Logitech mice running around that I can use. But can anyone tell me how I can map f9 to the middle mouse button? Whenever I try, it just pops Expose open instead.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
If Apple does come out with their own two button mouse, will it be available as an option OR is it going to replace the one button mouse completely? Are we looking at the demise of the one button mouse?
I've got an eMac and an iBook that I love, and I happily use the one-button option Apple provides, but when I get bored of that I plug in the 5 button + scroll-wheel Microsoft branded monstrosity trackball. It all works perfectly. I'm assuming this move is to get people to impulse upgrade while they're buying a new system, and to quell the usual hand-wringing from the PC fanboys. I don't think it's going to be the default option.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
... some of whatever the author's smokin'...
Two buttons too hard for the average user?
With less than 10% of market share? And every other mouse on the planet more than 1 button?
Roll me one of those...
Visualize Whirled P.'s
That reminds me of my Wife's first experience with a mac laptop. She inserted a floppy disc and we could NOT figure out how to get it out.
In the PC world you simply pushed a button right next to the drive. No such luck there.
After a few days I finally had to call a friend of mine to explain it to me. And to this day I don't understand why deleting the floppy icon from the desktop is more "insanely great" than simply pushing one button. Then again, maybe the emphasis isn't on the "great" but is on the "insane."
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Not to sound like an ardent Jobs supporter, but why would he have to say that he was wrong? The idea of a one button mouse still appeals to many less skilled computer users. I know that getting my grandma an Apple all those years ago was a great decision and I still think that she would do better with a one button mouse.
I don't think that the idea here is to replace the one button mouse, just offer a choice to those who wish to use two buttons and don't want to go third party.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
Apple kept to a one button mouse for ease of us and to prevent user confusion. What the /. crowd seems to miss is that the mac is made for simplicity for the average joe who never used a computer. Most geeky folk who have a solid understanding of an OS will want as many buttons on a mouse as possible. For for people (like most of parents?) that are clueless navigating an OS with a two button mouse is confusing. While I was doing phone support for gateway last year I would have to explain the difference a right and left mouse click ever other call. It was like magic... at some point I would ask the customer to right on something for a menu and everytime afterwards when I would ask to click on a specific item they would then ask "is that a right click, or a left click"? After 3 times of this I would have to tell them click means left mouse button and right click is a right mouse button. I'm sure no apple support tech has had to deal with that. The mac version of a right click, being either ctrl + click or holding down the mouse button for 3 seconds to generate a menu, doesn't lodge an idea of different kinds of clicks in the users mind. I personally think apple should stick with a one button mouse and let the geeks buy a 2-5 button mouse (which has suported in the mac os since os 9) if they want.
Two buttons will be way too confusing for your average user.
Anyone who's done phone support with an "average user" will agree. Trying to communicate the differences between right- and left-clicking can be difficult. Never mind having the person learn in exactly which circumstances you have to do each one.
Probably because you gain a *lot* more functionality/convenience from a two button mouse, and arguably quite a bit less from three. I think they're insane if they don't add a wheel, but it wouldn't really have to be clickable (lots of folks really don't get that the wheel is a button).
I'm firmly in the 3 button camp (UNIX/Linux user) but two is better than none, and I can see why they're doing that - especially given Apple's "interesting" notions about mice.
I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who will buy an iBook the minute they have a two-button (or more) trackpad...
I would say that it can be more productive - if you know how to use a second button. I've been using multi-button mice on Macs for years now. My main machine has a 6 button Logitech mouse.
But the iMac in my kitchen (which I'm using now) has a single button Apple mouse, and it's quite useable.
I think the rumored tactic of shipping a two-button mouse as an option is fine, but I don't ever want to see Apple ship a mouse with more than one button with the computers, for one simple reason. I've spent too much time trying to get computer novices to understand what a second button does, and many never get it. (these are the same people who never quite get the difference between a click and a double-click - when you throw another unlabeled button on the mouse, they lose it.)
I think a one button mouse is really useful and should come as standard with macs, it is a desigh philosophy they should keep to. It makes a world of difference to the people who are older and are just getting into computers.
Jonathanjk.com
Try pushing that button while the computer is in the middle of writing to the disk. Then, after reformatting the disk and checking if floppy drive still works, you may have some idea.
Well, basically the trash stands as a catch-all for "get rid of" and has since the first Mac OS. You can drag toolbar items to the trash, you can drag dock items to the trash, connected servers, if you happen to be dragging and dropping some text and you drag it to the trash can a clipping will be formed inside of it with the text of the drag etc.
Basically apple wants to create the best "digitized office" for their users. They wanted as little as possible to be on the outside of the computer, more buttons == greater complexity, for a bad example, its the same reason some people can't even program their VCR.
--Dan
I have to disagree here. I really can't stand the one-button mice on Macs (well, aesthetically they're nice, but from a usability standpoint they feel like they are forcing me to wear a mitten). On the other hand, I have never found a multi-button trackpad/ball/point on a laptop that I found even remotely usable. The nice thing about multi-button mice is that you are able to use one button with each finger. With a trackpad, you generally use both buttons with a thumb (I pondered the idea of placing the second button above the pad, but I have never seen an implementation of this concept), and so right-clicking is less ergonomic than control-clicking.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Dragging a floppy to the trash can has the institive meaning of "delete this floppy", not "eject this floppy".
That is a bad design decision. Face it Mac zealots.
Are you sure it's Control-Click?
On my PowerBook, thanks to Apples stupid "users will get confused by more than one mouse button" stance, I have no less than FOUR keys on my keyboard to the left of the space bar.
They are labelled - from the left - 'Fn', 'Ctrl', 'Alt/option' and the last one just has the Apple logo and a bizarre mechanical four leaf clover.
I can never, ever, for the life of me remember which button I press to get the context menu and which one I press to select more than one thing.
It keeps it safe, because you can 'accidently' hit the button on a PC case, which will cause it to spit out in the middle of reading/writing, causing a corrupted diskette. back to the topic at hand, A two button mouse is nice, but not necessary to run a Mac. You dont need two buttons to nagigate an OS (unless its Windows). And if it is really necessary to right click something on a Mac, I long gotten used to Control-Clicking, because my hands are on the keyboard more than the mouse. or my left hand is on the keyboard, and my right hand is moving the mouse.
I should probably add that Raskin's best achievement was to hire Bill Atkinson to whom we owe a lot of what made the Mac a Mac, like QuickDraw and HyperCard.
support of the apple floppy design is a good test on the worth of someone's opinion about apple products. If they strongly defend it, they're not objective. If they say something like, "yeah, it's a bad design, however...", then they're probably an apple fan that will give you an honest opinion.
FTA - "The two-button wireless optical mouse would likely debut at the $69 price point once reserved for the company's current wireless mouse. "
$70 for a two-button mouse? That's just as insane as not having a scroll wheel. 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.
Because other laptops are much better. My Dell has, let's see, Ctrl, Fn, the floaty Windows logo, and Alt.
Try a Japanese keyboard. Add three character set switches on the bottom row and soon your spacebar is less than three normal keys wide.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod mini, he proudly declared that nobody actually uses flash-based MP3 players; everyone who buys them "just sticks them in a drawer."
Less than a year later, Apple unveiled a player with the same feature set as 2002's Creativo MuVo. It was hailed as a great new product by Steve Jobs and the Apple faithful.
I for one cannot wait until Apple invents the two-button mouse.
For more information, click here.
Hmmm... proof that Apple was right? :)
May the source be with you!
Try pushing that button while the computer is in the middle of writing to the disk. Then, after reformatting the disk and checking if floppy drive still works, you may have some idea.
It's not like it has to be an either-or decision. Look at the CDROM drive on any modern PC. The eject button is not a physical hardware eject, but a electronic pushbutton that first checks with the operating system to see if it is safe to eject the drive. That is both user-friendly, and user-proof. The floppy drives were like this on many of the Macs for years and I cannot figure out why they stopped doing it lately.
It gets just plain rediculus when you have multiple tray-loading CD/DVD drives. The only way to open the tray to load a disk is to go to the menu-bar, click the eject menu, and then select the drive you want to eject. You can't tell me this is easier to learn or perform than pressing a button next to the drive you want to eject. The only possible explaination that I can think of, is that this is another one of the cases where Jobs made a decision based on what looked slick rather than what was easiest to use - won't want those ugly buttons fouling up the zenness that is the G5 case.
...Once you become a more serious Mac user you really do want more than one button on a mouse!
This is especially true if you need to keep multiple windows open and are running an image-editing or multimedia-editing program.
There's a very simple explanation: you don't want people to eject the floppy while the system reads or writes to it. Especially, if, like on the first Macs, you actually load the system from a floppy. Letting the system manage the ejection of floppies (instead of the hurried user) was a simple way to avoid problems, loss of data, system crash, you name it.
Besides, one of the first times I encountered a floppy was sometime in the eighties on a friend's Commodore or Amiga. Believe me, he didn't like when I pushed the little button to eject the floppy while the system was writing to it. But for me, I had no clue the system was still using the floppy. All in all, the ejection of floppies on a Mac is surely unnatural, but is not something totally stupid as PC zealots would want you to believe.
Yeah, and try ramming your car into a tree while you're driving 90 mph. Merely because you can do something stupid, doesn't mean you will.
I don't need to assume, I KNOW you have never worked a tech support job in a school environment. I came to love the "I can't get my floppy ejected" whine, over the "I ejected the floppy and it made a really loud sound and now I can't read it" whine.
If you're smart enough to find out how to eject a disc on a Mac, good for you. If you're not, good for you, someone else figured out a way to protect you from your own stupidity.
Or you could just right-click on the drive itself and tell it to eject. That honestly makes more sense to me than pressing buttons on the front of my tower.
As for floppies, *I* haven't seen a floppy with a smart eject system on any PC I've used. They're all simple, stupid physical released buttons. I'd much rather have my system eject it when it's done working than have to sit and watch the LED on the drive to make sure it's done before I hit eject.
When placing 2 buttons left-right, it is extremely likely that people mix them up. However, when placing a big button on the front and a little button more to the back (for example), all those problems are gone. I really hope that Apple doesn't come out with just another me-too two-button mouse, but understands that button placement in a new way can make it a lot easier for computing newcomers.
I fail to see why one can't have a zero button mouse that simply executes the appropriate action after a predefined delay. After all, many of us have happily lived with X windows auto focus to foreground for years with no obvious detriment.
Haven't ever used Photoshop before, have we?
The eject button is not a physical hardware eject, but a electronic pushbutton that first checks with the operating system to see if it is safe to eject the drive. That is both user-friendly, and user-proof. The floppy drives were like this on many of the Macs for years and I cannot figure out why they stopped doing it lately.
Huh? I don't believe Apple EVER made a floppy drive that had ANY form of an eject button. (They only had eject pin-holes.) I'm assuming you mean Apple made CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drives that had electronic eject switches on them for years, and abandoned them during the later G4 models, which would be true. As a result, however, I now have my Mac mini with no obtrusive buttons on the machine, but just as easy to eject a disk. Hit the keyboard eject swith. Same thing, different location.
The one-button mouse is a godsend for people who have no GUI-experience!
How on earth am I going to explain my mom that to do one thing, she has to click the left, and to do the other, she has to click the right button? She already gets confused at the possibility of having more than one application open.
The concept of point-and-click is screwed up by adding a contextual menu-button - that's click and point (and click again).
I know every function can also be reached only using the left button, but how would I have to explain to my mom not to use the right one (which would confuse her)?
I think Apple always made the right choice: make things simple up front. And anyone who wants more, can do so (command/ctrl/option-click or get a multibutton mouse).
Yeah, it's a relic of times when the Mac was floppy-based and had to do a lot of disk swapping. You needed a way to eject the disk without actually unmounting it, so they had to distinguish between the 'Eject' command (in the menu) and the 'Unmount' (drag to trash).
On the other hand, clued users were able to grasp this instantly, and non-clued users were able to grasp it after a minute. Compare this with the amount of time it takes to get a dumb PC user to figure out the difference between the right and left mouse buttons (which ranges from many, many years to infinite, as some users will confuse them their entire lives).
Also, since OSX, the trash turns into an eject icon when you grab a disk. And there's an 'Eject' button on the keyboard. So this complaint is now moot.
To Eject a disk in Mac OS (any version) you choose the 'Eject' command from a menu.
This is the primary method, just like opening a folder is done by clicking on it, then selecting 'Open'.
The 'drag it to the trash' thing is a shortcut just like doubleclick. Shortcuts benefit from being memorable, and the drama surrounding 'eek, the trash' surely serves that purpose.
I'd call it great design.
J
The jokes in the corridors about the one-button nature of the apple mouse are certainly many, but I've also heard some interesting discussion that it has a positive influence on UI design. Notably, because you're limiting the default user inputs to one button, you're requiring designers to think meaningfully about what the most important features are, and to put them someplace readily accessible. In other words, it makes it less tempting to just pour more and more "features" into the right-mouse-button menu.
Funny how they push ahead with this after Raskin's death. I wonder what he'd think.
Ya, but Apple knows people who want a two button mouse will buy one.
Two buttons are actually fairly confusing for many users. You may be surprised how many Windows users never touch that thing unless tech support tells them to do so.
Moreover, by only shipping a single button mouse, developers are forced to make sure their apps can work without multiple buttons. You'll never see an important Mac app where important application options can't be reached through the menu, achieved via drag and drop, etc. This is not the case with other operating systems.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Aha! I can tell you never learned the magical Shift-Command-3 shortcut for ejecting a floppy on a Mac. Of course, this is even less intuitive.
I think that the design decision they made was about two things: creating a sense of safety, and making sure the OS knows what you are doing.
By requiring you to eject the disk via a software command, the OS can always tell if the disk is in or out. On older macs with only one drive you could eject the disk, but leave a "ghost" of the disk on the desktop. This made it possible to copy one floppy to another with only one floppy drive. You could insert the first disk, eject it, insert the second, and then drag the second disk onto the "ghost" of the first disk.
As someone else pointed out though, they could have put a non-mechanical eject button on the drive linked to the OS.
The "data safety" issue: Have you ever pulled a usb memory accessory off of your PC without first "unpluging or ejecting your hardware?" Windows and Mac both grumble at you when you do this, warning that you may have lost data. To an advanced user this is an annoyance, but to a novice user, this is a bad experience that leaves them wondering what damage they have done. By always letting the OS override whether the disk could be ejected, the user no longer was responsible for potentially damaging data by ejecting the disk at the wrong time. This creates a better user experience in the long run because the user no longer is part of the equation of data loss from the floppy. It reduces worry at the expense of making the process of ejecting the disk more complicated.
On a totally unrelated note: I do think Apple deserves credit for being the first to ship a desktop PC with no floppy drive (the original iMac). At first I thought this decision was crazy -- but I don't think I've used a floppy disk in the last three years. Sometimes design decisions should show leadership, not always attempt to do whatever users want. In this case they took a big step forward.
But I find the one button mice a lot more comfortable, as my hand doesn't have to be glued to the thing in a pre-determined position in order to click it. Oddly enough, I was a fan of the hockey puck mouse before it, as I was one of the only people to use the thing correctly, by steering it with my fingertips, leaving my hand parked to the desk. Same with my ibook, I leave my thumb laying more or less horizontally over the single button. If apple goes to two button laptops, I'm pretty much fucked. =/
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Here is one thing I have noticed. We have an eMac at home and two of my three kids are preschoolers. They have a very easy time using the zero (what I mean is that the entire mouse is one big button) button mouse from Apple. It is not too big too. At the library they have these two button plus scroll wheel Microsoft ergonomic mice connected to the computers for the kids. First of all those mice are way too big and there is this big hump at the base of the mouse that makes it very difficult for my kids to use. Since they have to hold the mouse near the top, very often the mouse will turn to the side and then the motion is all wrong relative to what they expect the cursor to do on the screen. The fact that the scroll wheel is in the way and that there are two buttons also causes confusion. What happens is that they end-up just clicking repeatedly until they finally click on the left mouse button and if they click on the scroll wheel their hand rolls off.
On the other hand the size of the current Apple mouse is just perfect. It is not too small for an adult and not too big for a child. Because of the size and the fact that the whole mouse is one big button, my kids can hold the mouse near its middle, and then it does not rotate while being moved.
I have heard the argument that once you start using a computer long enough you start wanting extra mouse buttons. What I think is that those people are not sophisticated enough. Even when I was using unix primarily, I configured fvwm and vim so that I could do almost everything from the keyboard. Today there are keyboard shortcuts for almost anything on OS X plus a bunch of small apps to add even more shortcut functionality. I really do not miss a three button mouse all the much at all. In fact I use SideTrack on my iBook and think that is perfect for the times I need to copy and paste in X11.app. Maybe Apple should make a compact keyboard with a trackpad instead of a two button mouse. If that keyboard was wireless, it would be perfect for sitting on the couch too especially with two finger scrolling.
One thing about OS X that is very frustrating is that I have not figured out an easy way to use the built-in spell checker with only the keyboard. If anyone knew an easy way to pop-up that menu with suggested corrections, I would really appreciate it. Also using the accessibility features and that spelling dialog box with only the keyboard is really annoying because the things you want to do are too many key presses away, so that is not really a viable solution...
This causes the problem known in eye-tracking systems as "The Midas Touch". Suddenly you risk activating anything you look at, or in this case, anything you park the mouse on. This would drive just about anyone crazy in no time flat.
if dragging a disk to somewhere used to be a trash can is dumb, talking something you don't know is dumber.
I understand why you don't understand.
The reality is if you are draging a disk, the trash can becomes a "Eject" sign magically.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Speaking as a Mac/PC user, I still fail to see why Macintosh thinks that a second mouse button is far too difficult for people to grasp, yet using two hands to control-click somehow isn't.
With a tilting scroll wheel, its pretty easy to move it up or down OR left or right. With a trackball, probably more than half the users would be frustrated with their inability to roll the ball in a straight line.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Frankly, I'd be surprised if Apple released a completely standard two-button mouse without putting any kind of a twist on things. They're pretty good these days about adhering to standards, but they also like to innovate rather than releasing old, clunky designs. Along with everything else, it doesn't seem to me that there'd be much of a point-- there are already plenty of vendors of 2-button USB mice to choose from, so why bother reversing their position if they weren't going to do something interesting?
I guess they might do something like detect it by device ID and select different default behaviour though...
No reason why they couldn't, given that they would control both the hardware and the OS...
The system doesn't have a button to eject it and they count on the user KNOWING that deleting the icon will eject it? I wouldn't even think you could delete the icon to start with. Why would you delete something that isn't a file?
Most people type like that sentence above on email, and non-legible-typing people don't seem to have much trouble getting laid.
Weeeell, that's because ppl who tipe liek this come in both genders. The stupid memes are breeding true!
People who don't write correctly formed English make me froth at the mouth, especially if I have to decode their crap in my professional capacity. Mostly it scares me that so many people have to go to special effort not to sound like chimpanzees. And it's not just email - these people usually produce the same kind of garbage on paper too.
I wonder how Job's will keynote this. Not a guy who likes to say 'I was wrong'
NeXT's mouse had two buttons.
I'm sure the introduction of the new mouse will be somewhat humorous (ie: "Hell finally froze over" (iTunes for Windows), Fast User Switching (Windows had something first), etc).
My suspicion is that the one-button mouse will remain default, and iBooks will keep the single button (although the PowerBooks may go two, at least as an option). Multi-button trackpads are really awful from a usability point of view.
Since Mac OS is designed to utilize, but not require, a two-button mouse, making it default would be a mistake (IMO).
"i take it I'm not the only one who thinks the ipod's scroll wheel interface was designed by watching women masturbate?"
That's hardly similar when compared to the IBM Trackpoint...
It's inconceivable and insulting maybe to suggest that a lot of people have trouble enough mastering one mouse-button, but that's the truth of it. I don't care about all the arguments in favour of other choices, I'm all for them, as long as they remain choices. I use a two button scroll wheel MS mouse myself, and actually liked the four button scroll thing mouse a lot more, but for my father in law - a verrrrrry intelligent individual btw - I had to go back to his standard one button Apple mouse or else his brain would explode. I know other examples.
/.
There seem to be two schools on
1) good that "average" people (whatever, my father and father in law can hardly be called average and have IQ's way above...) use computers, let's accommodate them.
2) people not able to master command line should be eliminated from the gene pool.
For all you people in category 2 I hope you can live without all those people your life revolves around that sadly don't think their computer is important at all... like some extremely devoted doctors I know, or even some people elemental in the making of high caffeine beverages or pizza's!!!!!!!!!!
I think, therefore I am...I think.