What Comes To Pass

Mighty Mouse

I bought a Mighty Mouse yesterday and having finally got it home, I've been using it for a few hours.

So far the clicking is flawless, there's no 'button' - the whole mouse is a button and by sensing where your fingers are when you apply click pressure it either right or mouse clicks for you.

The squeeze is a nice feature, one which has a grounding in thumb buttons on other mice. However the squeeze pressure is a little high for my liking and in order to use it without changing your grip, you have to have your hand far forward on the mouse. That's not the way you should be using a mouse (although it is the way that most people use it) with the Hockey-Puck mouse Apple demonstrated that you're not supposed to move the mouse with your wrist and rest your hand on it but instead to plant your wrist on the desk and move it with your fingers - this eliminates RSI and increases mouse accuracy massively. A lot of people simply didn't understand this and demanded that they be allowed to use their mice in the wrist-crippling manner they had grown accustomed to. This is why, when Apple moved to its optical mouse, it used a design which accommodated both the masochists and the rest of us.

Yet with Mighty Mouse, I can only apply casual pressure to get the squeeze to work when my hand is far forward on the mouse, eliminating the benefits of the 'crab' grip that so many of us have grown accustomed to. I feel kind of annoyed that the squeeze pressure isn't alterable or better yet, set up so that crab grip users can make use of it properly. At the moment it's pretty effort-intensive for what should be a little squeeze.

Finally, there's the big feature - the Scrollball.

The Scrollball is lovely on nearly all accounts. Being able to scroll anywhere and in any direction makes a big difference, especially with people who have to manipulate large graphical images and for being able to scroll through film footage and timelines (score!) Its click is very nice indeed and brings up Dashboard by default and functions as a middle click in games (at least World of Warcraft intelligently recognized it as such).

However there's one problem with it. Each millimeter of movement is measured with a little click. When you have lots of them together, it's a buzz and at a certain scroll speed you reach a resonant frequency which feels uncomfortable on your finger, rather like one of those buzzers that you deploy by shaking hands. I think it has a lot to do with how small the actual Scrollball is but at the moment it's kind of annoying.

Overall, this could be a really solid input device, but for the buzz. I'd recommend you try one out in an Applestore before you buy, it might put you in a different mind.

Later

John

UPDATE: Holy Crap... The scrollwheel's annoying sounds and buzz are produced by a tiny speaker and small electronic sensors. Basically they're intentionally included. See for yourself, unplug your Mighty Mouse (if you have one) and screw around with the Scrollball. Not annoying, not in the slightest bit unpleasant. Let's hope there's a way to stop this with Firmware.