Everybody loves a good magic show, as long as the magic works. Last week, Apple introduced its Magic Mouse, which it bills as "the world’s first Multi-Touch mouse." With its Bluetooth connectivity, it now enables many of the multi-touch gestures that users of the iPhone, iPod Touch, and newer MacBooks have come to love.
However, some initial reviews have been less than stellar, which raises the question of whether the Magic Mouse is more style than substance. While CNET raved about its sleek appearance, it was very critical of the Magic Mouse’s narrow profile that "sits too low for comfort", "awkward and unnatural" feel when sliding our middle and index fingers across the flat surface, and inability to reassign the gestures to suit your personal preferences.
The image below shows the many multi-touch gestures the Mighty Mouse offers. I haven’t had an opportunity to try one out myself, but I welcome your comments of your experiences.
I tried this in the Apple store yesterday, and I thought it worked well. Scrolling felt nice, and I like how you can “throw” the page just like on the iPhone (i.e., it keeps scrolling a little bit after you take your finger away).
I can’t believe, however, that this mouse doesn’t support middle clicking. I middle-click all of my web links to open them in a new tab. I consider this completely indispensable, and won’t consider this mouse until that feature is added.
I tried the new iMac and Magic Mouse today at the local Apple store. I agree with CNET that the mouse sits too low – or put another way, it makes your perfectly healthy hand feel arthritic. I didn’t care for it at all which was disappointing because it was probably the feature I was looking forward to trying the most. It has some features that are cool – using 1 finger to scroll up or down. But nothing earth shattering. I love my Macbook pro’s mouse pad so I was looking forward to a similar experience. FAIL.
The new iMac looks sweet though. I played the movie trailer for the new “Avatar” movie in 1080HD and it rocked.
I purchased the Magic Mouse online at the Apple Store and have used it for a few days and love it. I purchased the MacBook Pro a few weeks earlier (working the Mac into a PC environment) and the two work great together. The Mac’s trackpad and the Magic Mouse’s track surface go hand in hand and are making my transition to Mac as primary computer much easier. I was using a quad-core HP desktop with two Dell 21″ monitors so i thought it would be more difficult to get used to a Mac laptop but it’s not.
For those of you using the Magic Mouse try installing an app called BetterTouchTool (you thought you loved it, wait until you try it with this tool). BetterTouchTool gives you more gesture options like three finger swipe to use Expose and so much more that you can assign to the mouse. I have an iMac with a Cinema Display attached as my second monitor, I’ve assigned the Magic Mouse a three finger swipe from left to right or vice versa telling my active window to move to either monitor. For instance lets say I have a window open on Monitor one and would like to launch another app I can easily move my current app to Minitor two by a three finger swipe. Needless to say I love this mouse. (by the way you can assign the pinch zoom using this tool) Have fun 🙂