OS X to support 2 button mice.
October 31, 2000 2:16 PM   Subscribe

OS X to support 2 button mice. Nice to see Apple finally catch up the cutting-edge, 1983 technology.
posted by mathowie (34 comments total)
 
Apple have mice now?
posted by jessie at 2:25 PM on October 31, 2000


Somebody once claimed that Apple has always had multi-button mice, it's just that most of the buttons were physically located on the keyboard. Tog, perhaps?
posted by harmful at 2:37 PM on October 31, 2000


At my last job, I worked on a Power Mac G4 running OS/9 and I had one of those Macally two-button mice with the scrolling wheel. I distinctly remember being able to use that second button; I think it was set up to work like Option-click.

Anyway, because of that, I thought Apple always did support the 2-button mouse. ::shrug:: I guess the Macally mouse came with software.
posted by aprilgem at 2:52 PM on October 31, 2000


Wake me when they add a START button.
posted by john at 2:53 PM on October 31, 2000


I have been using a two-button scrolling mouse on a Mac for a few years now. The software was third party, but it worked well enough. Most programs have some function that pops up immediately, but you could program macros if you want to customize. I hope there will be greater OS integration, otherwise this is nothing all that new.
posted by thirteen at 2:54 PM on October 31, 2000


I'm missing the 4-button Turbo Mouse trackball I used to use with my mac 6100. I don't like the quality of the newer trackballs and am debating on whether I should get an ADB adapter and try using it with the iMac. I guess i'm just thinking out loud here.


posted by gluechunk at 2:59 PM on October 31, 2000


The Apple menu is essentially the same as the Start buttion (unless you mean the Windows key on the keyboard), and they had that since at least 7.0 (around 1992?).
posted by sylloge at 4:29 PM on October 31, 2000


Actually, the Mac has always had an Apple menu; it's just that until 7.0, you could only put special programs called Desk Accessories in it (and you had to install them with a special program called Font/DA Mover). System 7 revised the Apple menu so it was just a folder of files. Later (7.5?) they made it hierarchical by licensing a third-party utility.
posted by kindall at 5:29 PM on October 31, 2000


Nuh-uh..

The useful thing about the start button is that *all installing applications put a menu there*.

That *is not true* of the Apple Menu -- while you can have your apps there, and I always do, you have to do it yourself.
posted by baylink at 5:32 PM on October 31, 2000


Good point baylink. The converse is also true though: I have to manually go through and *remove* all the crap in my start menu that I don't need (having it scroll 2000px high, full of nested folders, as mine is now, is worse than having a very sparse one).

I'm kind of surprised that Mindvision hasn't made "Optionally Install an Alias in Apps Folder on Apple Menu" a default for VISE. Then it'd handy-dandy.
posted by sylloge at 5:47 PM on October 31, 2000


Most respectible windows apps these days give you the option of whether or not you want it to install to the Start menu and whether or not you want it to add a desktop icon. It's worth going through the extra two or three screens to get to the option page with those checkboxes by selecting a "Custom" installation, where they're usually hidden.

My preferred desktop is a two "line" taskbar, with many toolbars added that contain shortcuts to applications I use, devided into things like Media, Visual, Geek, Development, Database, etc. By shrinking them, you end up getting a double-arrow (ie, >>) that makes a popup menu full of the shortcuts. It's cut down my Wading Through The Start Menu time dramatically.

I think I'm being unintentionally vague and off-topic again though.
posted by cCranium at 6:18 PM on October 31, 2000


The useful thing about the start button is that *all installing applications put a menu there*.

That's useful? Sounds damned annoying to me.

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 6:51 PM on October 31, 2000


So apple's supporting two button mice, but they're still not shipping with them. They're new mouse is 1 button. So much for progress.
posted by matt324 at 7:20 PM on October 31, 2000


It's rumored that a successor to the Pro Mouse is in development which will act as a two-button mouse (it'll have two pressure points instead of just one).
posted by darukaru at 7:52 PM on October 31, 2000


Windows users are always quite smug about their two-button mice, despite any compelling evidence for their superiority. If two buttons are better why not three? Four?

Who says mice are the best input devices anyway? Why not trackpads? Or Trackballs? Or graphics tablets? Why don't I hear clamoring for "built-in OS support for trackballs"?

Because that would be inane. The MacOS has supported any and all of those input devices for as long as I've been using it. Two-button mice became more useful after System 8 implemented contextual menus, but they existed before then.

All extra-buttoned Mac mice come with software that allow you to configure the extra buttons any way you wish - the usual way is map the second button to CTRL-Click. You can even get the scroll-wheeled mice if you wish.

The choice of a pointing device is very personal, and depends on a lot of factors. There's no one correct answer - and it's not like every Windows user uses the mouse that came with their system.

posted by dweingart at 9:20 PM on October 31, 2000


Why have two buttons? Because just one is too few, but more than two is too many! :) No really, though, I think it's important to have one button for "primary" functionality like starting a program or opening a folder or what-have-you, and a second button for context-based alternative options. For example, the mouse pointer is in a text area, I want to perform some operation on some selected text. But there are several possible operations! It's faster and more efficient to be able to pull up a menu of those options immediately, hence the second button. Why not add more? A third button would just confuse things, unless it also had a dedicated purpose. The scroll-wheel/clicker thing on new mice has a precise function, and it's easy to distinguish from the other two buttons. Essentially, primary button = primary task; secondary button = contextual menu; odd-shaped button = some other vital function (scrolling). I guess my real point is that more buttons is good as long as they are easy to distinguish without looking at the mouse. MS's current two-buttons-and-a-wheel format fulfill that purpose. More would be useful, but the challenge is how to make them easily accessible and easily distinguishable without looking. It's only moderately more complicated than a one-button mouse, and it's easy enough to just use the primary button. But it has so much more power than a one-button mouse.

Jabber jabber jibber.
posted by daveadams at 10:03 PM on October 31, 2000


My mouse has 6 buttons and I'm in love with it. The usual two (main and context menu), the flywheel (scrolling) is also a button (multi-directional navigation) plus it has two extra buttons on the sides that came pre-configured doubling as the browser's Back and Forward buttons --which for me is useless-- so I reprogrammed them as PageUp and PageDown, and they make my life so much easier.
posted by tremendo at 10:40 PM on October 31, 2000


size queen.
posted by patricking at 12:05 AM on November 1, 2000


I got a four-button Kensington Thinking Mouse for my Mac in about, oh, 1993 or 1994. In addition to letting you program each of the four buttons individually, you could program two combinations of "chords" of two adjacent buttons for a total of six possible mouse actions. I used that mouse for several years and then turned around and sold it on eBay for over $100. No joke. (They no longer make this particular model and apparently some people are willing to pay a premium to get their mitts on one.) It originally cost me $70. That's right, I used a mouse for like six years and then sold it for a profit.

Those with the desire to learn some new pointing device maneuvers have always been able to make themselves more efficient. Tellingly, though, when I tried to set my mom up with a multi-button mouse when she got her first Mac, she told me outright she preferred the standard one. Now, with a few years of using Macs under her belt, she could probably be comfortable with a multi-button mouse, but I don't exactly hear her clamoring for one.

The fact is, even an expert user like me is perfectly capable of being productive with a single-button mouse on a Mac; I used the Apple Pro Mouse for something like a month at my new job until they got around to supplying me with my requested MS IntelliMouse Explorer, and while I prefer the MS mouse, I have to admit the actual productivity increase I gain thereby is probably marginal.
posted by kindall at 10:53 AM on November 1, 2000


When you can build a high-end Mac using components *not* made by Apple and for less than $1000, wake me.
posted by Hackworth at 11:52 AM on November 1, 2000


hackworth: does the dual 604e/200 in my closet count? It outruns a first-generation G3... I guess that's not high-end anymore, but it was a veritable rocket when I built it (using no Apple-sourced components, I might add). Cost me about $400, I think...

ok, ok, special case, exception proves the rule, yadda yadda. You win.

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 12:24 PM on November 1, 2000


As most PC users may think, MacOS never needed a 2nd mouse, buecause of the interface.

You can use a "second button" pressing CTRL + click.

Start menu? thanks God we don't have a START button on the bottom left corner and we *DO* have a very cool menu on the top left corner always available.

And a high end computer at less than $1000, well, I prefer buying a $2000 G4 super computer than a $800 slow Pentium III with Windows98 crashing my system 10 - 15 times a day :O)

oh..by the way...we have a graphic interface since '82 :O)

posted by neo at 2:41 PM on November 1, 2000


As most PC users may think, MacOS never needed a 2nd mouse, buecause of the interface.

Eh? I'm confused. The use of a second mouse button on PCs isn't required. It's a nice option to have, but it's not required. The Mac doesn't give you that option. I'm not sure in what ways the MacOS interface somehow makes the functionality of the second button superfluous, but perhaps someone could enlighten me.

And a high end computer at less than $1000, well, I prefer buying a $2000 G4 super computer than a $800 slow Pentium III with Windows98 crashing my system 10 - 15 times a day

This argument doesn't even make sense.

we have a graphic interface since '82

Which is irrelevant, except in that you've been using the same one for these 18 years. :)

Just doing my part to further the religious OS wars.
posted by daveadams at 7:11 PM on November 1, 2000


neo, you poor, poor die hard Mac user....

I just came out of a beta Mac OS X demonstration put on by several Apple associates, and the new hyped OS really does suck. Even the guy giving the presentation jokingly put down Mac users in general several times throughout the 1 hour period--I was surprised and impressed. OS X tries to be way too pretty and "fun to play mess around with", and proves to be completely unproductive and inefficient. I guess Apple is just continuing their trend, like with everything else they make.....For example, every single time you minimize a window, you see a huge obnoxious graphical animation of the window being sucked into the bottom right corner. It looks kinda cool the first time maybe, but the Mac guy said there's no way to even turn it off!

Hints of Windows 9x can also be seen in it. Aside from the new minimize button, they also added a maximize one (actually it maxes the window to only about 2/3 of the screen). And they added a shitty "taskbar" at the bottom, which is entirely graphically-based. So X is Unix-based, I'll give them that, but the UI just blows goats

posted by grank at 7:39 PM on November 1, 2000


Is the '+' button 'maximize' or is it 'zoom'? And surely you can turn off the minimize/restore animations, right?
posted by daveadams at 7:59 PM on November 1, 2000


I'm sure there's no documented way to turn off the Mac OS X window animations. I'm just as sure there's a way to do it somewhere. Just like there's an undocumented way to put local disk icons and a Trash icon back on the desktop.

The "+" button is in fact a Mac-style zoom, not a Windows-style maximize. Zoom makes the window just big enough to see the entire contents, if that's possible. Maximize always fills the screen with the window, which is useless much of the time. The Mac wins this one hands-down. In fact, if there were a patch that made the maximize button in Windows work this way, I'd pay money for it. It sure would make it easier on the occasions I have to use Windows.
posted by kindall at 9:28 PM on November 1, 2000


+ button? There's 3 "bubble" buttons in the top left of each window... The middle (yellow) one is the maximize.

kindall, I must totally disagree with you and your thoughts on the current Maximize button in Windows. Filling the screen with that current window is NOT 'useless much of the time' by any means.

Some apps that I use: IE, Word, email program, a math program, Excel, FTP program......EVERY ONE of them makes good use of maximizing the window, completely going against your claim.

Now look at this picture of the "Dock" (taskbar). Can you get much more inefficient?


posted by grank at 2:48 AM on November 2, 2000


kindall: I generally hate the behavior of zoom. It shrinks the window just as often as it makes it larger. I think the predictability of Windows-style maximize is better UI, but maybe I'd get used to it.

grank: the yellow button gets a '+' inside of it when the mouse comes close. Thank goodness, because the colors don't mean anything to me. Except maybe red. And then if you're color-blind or color-deficient, you're even more outta luck.

Of course, everyone knows that window control buttons should be on the upper-right hand corner of the window. ;)
posted by daveadams at 8:41 AM on November 2, 2000


kindall, I must totally disagree with you and your thoughts on the current Maximize button in Windows. Filling the screen with that current window is NOT 'useless much of the time' by any means.

It depends on how you're thinking about it. The maximize button makes sense if you want the program to take over your monitor and monopolize the UI. If you don't want that, it feels intrusive and awkward.

The zoom button is a bit simpler; it just wants to make the window big enough to see all of its contents, without obscuring the icons or menu bar. If you want to focus on one window and close out the rest of the UI, the zoom button won't help you at all.

Most of the things people fight over about different UIs boil down to this sort of conceptual thing: what does it all mean, underneath? It's easy to adjust to changes in the look of a menu bar or the dimensions of a scrollbar; it's the behaviours underneath that cause all the problems.

-Mars, former mac partisan who now spends most of the day in bash, and still knows nothing about windows
posted by Mars Saxman at 12:13 PM on November 2, 2000


I said the Windows-style maximize is useless much of the time. Not always by any means. Excel, for instance, makes good use of as much screen space as you can give it. But many programs are not Excel.

However, what exactly is Word going to do if you make a document window 1200 pixels wide, when a page is only about half that wide?

How is it useful to make a window that contains only a handful of icons fill a 1280 X 870 screen, so that the window contains about 95% white space and blocks any other windows you might have open, to which you might want to drag some of those icons?

How is it useful to make a Web browser expand to that kind of width, when it's well-known that extremely long lines of text are hard to read (and the longer, the harder)? This isn't even a computer thing, people have known this for a long time -- it's why newspapers and magazines have columns, it's why most books are narrow and tall rather than short and wide.

I'm sure you can think of other situations in which the Windows maximize behavior is, at best, annoying, and at worst actively hostile to usability or readability.
posted by kindall at 12:41 PM on November 2, 2000


[Mars, re Maximize] If you don't want that, it feels intrusive and awkward.

It's only intrusive if you click on it. Now that I can run my PCs at 1024x768 or higher, I hardly ever use the maximize button. But when I do, the point is exactly to have the window I'm working with completely take the screen (except for the taskbar... people who auto-hide their taskbar are freaks! :). With the window at full-screen, I minimize (ha ha) distractions of other windows that may be open and icons on the desktop. Mac allows this same functionality with the Hide Others command, but you can still see the desktop.

At least Windows lets you resize windows from any side or corner, I can't tell you how frustrating it is when I'm using a Mac and I have to use the lower-right corner. Then I have to redrag the window to where I want. With Windows, I can drag the corner or side that makes sense based on where I want the new position of the window to be and save an operation.
posted by daveadams at 12:42 PM on November 2, 2000


[kindall] However, what exactly is Word going to do if you make a document window 1200 pixels wide, when a page is only about half that wide?

Display text at 200%, perhaps? The better to anti-alias with. :)

[kindall] I'm sure you can think of other situations in which the Windows maximize behavior is, at best, annoying, and at worst actively hostile to usability or readability.

But that's not an argument against the maximize function. It's an option, not something you are required to use! If anything you should be arguing that Windows should provide a Zoom function, not that maximize is annoying. Minimize is annoying, too, if you want to use the window, but if it's in your way, then minimize is perfect.
posted by daveadams at 12:45 PM on November 2, 2000


Yeah, I do like being able to resize windows from any side. I have an extension for my Mac called Windox that kind of does the same thing, though not really.
posted by kindall at 9:43 PM on November 2, 2000


That's useful? Sounds damned annoying to me.

Not if you've just sat down at the machine, and are trying to figure out what's loaded on it, it's not. Yes, some apps are a bit *too* good at putting stuff on that menu, but nothing drives me further up a wall than sitting down at someone's Mac and having *no idea* what programs have been installed on it. I usually put an alias to the Applications folder in the apple menu folder... but ghod help you for those people who do their Graphics v. Audio v. Internet, etc, splitting *next to the Applications folder*, instead of underneath it where they belong.

Doesn't Apple have a guideline for that stuff anymore? I've even seen installers do it.
posted by baylink at 1:46 PM on November 3, 2000


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