REVIEW: The Mighty Mouse
I have to admit I was very skeptical about the Mighty Mouse. Just about ever review I read sort of gave me a "nyah umm maybe nahh" feeling. To begin with I have always used the basic every day one button Apple mouse that came with my Mac. This is not because I am some Mac zealot who doesn't believe in having 2 buttons, I think it was more to do with not having a reason to go out and buy a new mouse when the one I have is perfectly fine for what I do...Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash etc. However, when my wife got a new PowerBook, and the necessity of buying a new mouse came along, I decided to take the gamble and get the fanciest of mouses that Apple has to offer. (The price difference here in Sweden between a regular mouse and third party two button mice and the Mighty Mouse is about 15 dollars.)
Having had sufficient enough time to really give the MM a work over, I think I can give you my honest opinion. I love it. In a man to mouse sort of way.
I brought the nifty little box home from the store, took out the mouse, plugged it in and installed the necessary software. All went off without a hitch. (I should point out that the MM is designed for Tiger, which means you'll not be able to program the different buttons if you are using Panther or are one of the 4 Windows users who bought the thing. Yes, it works on PC's.)
The "out of the box" configuration, that Apple seems to think is the best, is set up as Left and Right buttons as usual, Scrollball press opens Dashboard, Side Buttons for Exposé. In the first hour of messing around I managed to cause Dashboard to open about 30 times. You have to get used to the Scrollball. I eventually found it much handier to switch the Exposé and Dashboard functions around. Since I tend to use Exposé more often than Dashboard. Having both of them on the mouse makes life a lot easier, at least it saves the half a second it takes to hit F10 or F12. Let it also be know that the same function of holding down F12, checking Dashboard, and releasing works the same with the MM if you hold in the side buttons.
Speaking of the side buttons, this is where a lot of the complaining has come from. Personally after about an hour there was no problem. But, they are a bit strange at first. Most complaints are that they are difficult to activate and offer no feedback. In my case I haven't found them to be difficult, and I haven't had the problem with them being awkwardly placed either. As for getting some sort of clicky feedback signal, well you can live without it, it's pretty obvious with the screen activity that something happened.
As the MM is not technically a two button mouse, since it well, has no buttons. it can be a bit strange getting used to clicking the same thing for two different fuctions. It takes a bit of messing around till you get the hang of right clicking in the right spot. I have a horrible tendency to accidentally right-click instead of left-click. This is getting more and more uncommon but it does happen. I imagine this is to be expected when you are so used to just pressing down anywhere on a mouse for the same function. But, on the bright side, just having the right-click ability is quite an eyeopener. I had really forgotten how nice it can be with so many shortcuts. I find new ones all the time that I was completely unaware of, and man is it better than Ctrl clicking on everything. Safari is a much smoother experience with a second button, expecially for opening new tabs, checking source code, refreshing, downloading, you name it. Avoiding the menu bar is becoming a hobby.
And now the best part, the "Scrollball". Say what you will about scrollbuttons, and that they have been around for ages, and sure you could have bought a mouse ages ago with the same fuctionality, but this one is perfect. You can scroll Up, Down, Left, Right and Diagonal. And it is intuitive. Your, or in my case, index finger immediately finds and uses the little ball without a thought. It is great for basic scrolling, but even better when you use any sort of graphic program. You can easily move across any image or document, a time saver if ever there was one, not to mention simplifying an annoying aspect of design work. And it definitely is a saving grace in iTunes where you have to scroll right to left and up and down.
What other functions can you program the MM to do? Well, let's see. The calibration and button configuration panel is located in the Keyboard and Mouse section of System Preferences. It offers a variety of options including speed and scroll functionality, as well as the button preferences.
You can pretty much customize it any number of ways, you can bring up Spotlight, switch between applications, use a variety of Exposé functions, or turn it off all together. Then there is the strange "Other" option. This allows you to open a specific program or even a specific folder or document. I can see this as an advantage for short amounts of times when you need to constantly get at a particular thing. If you are looking for even more fuctionality, ie double click functions etc, then you can throw down $20 for SteerMouse a third-party driver that will make Mighty Mouse even mightier. I may give it a go in the future.
Do I think it should be offered as the standard mouse with all new Mac's? Well, why not? You can always program it to act exactly like a regular mouse, so what's there to lose. There really are only positive sides to it. Is it wireless, no. Is that a problem? Well, that depends how badly you require a Bluetooth mouse. I actually prefer the wired variety, no batteries means less weight and not having to spend money on batteries. No doubt in the future Apple will offer a wireless one.
So, all in all, I think I got my money's worth. The only thing that would have made me happier was if I got at least one Apple sticker in the box. I'm hooked, in fact at work the day after I bought the MM I was already trying to use it's super powers on a regular Apple mouse...I think that says it all.
K. Panda
