As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m a Mac die-hard. I use them, program them, and evangelize them to others. At first glance, I thought Apple’s new Mighty Mouse was a great idea: now Apple has it’s own two-button mouse and Windows people have even less excuse to avoid Mac. (Although in truth, Macs have supported two-button mice since, like, forever.) Apple has again proven they’re an industrial design leader in providing a very slick package with very innovative features.
Unfortunately, the Mighty Mouse has a little flaw.
I’m acutally quite used to using a two-button mouse. I use a generic two-button mouse with a scroll wheel all day in my office. I also love the trackpad on my PowerBook. In fact the newest trackpads have a very cool feature that allows them to double as a two-dimensional scroll wheel simply by sliding two fingers at a time over the pad. Apple’s mistake with the Mighty Mouse is in trying to have the induction-based trackpad technology stand in for both mouse buttons. You see, the Mighty Mouse doesn’t actually have two buttons– it has a single internal switch and it determines whether you’ve left- or right-clicked by which part of the touch-sensitive shell you’re touching when you click. But what if both fingers are touching when you click? Then it’s a left-click. Unfortunately, in just the few minutes I played with the Mighty Mouse in the Apple Store I could tell this would never work for me, because I naturally rest both my index and middle fingers on the mouse as I work. This means that to right-click I must lift my left finger off the mouse. While this might seem like a small thing to some, and while I don’t doubt this is a skill I could eventually learn to do without thinking, it seems quite unnatural to me at the moment. And I’m not so unhappy with the mouse I currently use that adapting to a Mighty Mouse seems like it would carry much of a net benefit.
So, I’m hoping Apple can do better. No doubt they already have a Bluetooth version of MM in the works. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask that they can also improve the click-recognition mechanism to determine which finger is pressed down harder when the internal switch gets tripped. Failing that, they really ought to just use two buttons– sometimes the tried-and-true really is better.
