l-dopa

I picked up the Mighty Mouse a week or two ago. For the most part, I think it is great, but there are a couple of chinks in the armor.

The scroll wheel is fantastic. It isn’t a nipple like the ThinkPad, but rather a tiny little rolling ball held up by a soft spring, allowing you to scroll in four directions. The use of the nipple never made sense to me physically, since you don’t move it, per se, and it has it’s own acceleration thing going. The ball or wheel makes much more sense in the context of a mouse, in which you are dragging and pushing things around already.

The side grips server double duty as a button now, but the construction leaves something to be desired. Since it serves as a gripping point, it takes an extra strong squeeze to activate it as a button. That aside, the overall construction is great. The mouse is lightweight, and it somehow can tell where you are clicking, though it feels exactly the same on your finger, no matter where you press. Apple gets points for the technical cool factor, and the user experience success factor. For as subtle as it looks, this mouse has 4 buttons, plus the wheel. Right and left clicks, clicking directly over the scroll wheel (you actually click the mouse, not the wheel), and gripping the sides can all perform different functions. But…

The software leaves something to be desired. You can’t assign keystrokes to buttons, which means I can’t set a button to be “back” in my browser. You can assign it to open any application or document you want, so I guess I could set it to open an appleScript that “pressed back”, but that would be crappy from a user experience perspective. The nice thing is that it is 1.0 software, and I’m sure that sort of thing will be addressed.