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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
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.
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.
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
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.
...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.