It's easier and more efficient when your mouse doesn't have a third button. Isn't that what we're talking about? Mice that don't have the ideal third button (or one at all)?

Trying to press down a scroll wheel as a third button seems to always be an exercise in frustration as has been mentioned. As I'm still moving the mouse cursor around, I'm already moving my left hand to the key, so that by the time I click, it's all a single action.

I'm also fond of using the key modifier method when using a trackpad that doesn't have three dedicated buttons. It's easier/faster than having a special gesture or region because I can move both hands, each to an easy target, faster than one hand to a specific point on the pad.

LMAO
When I sit down at a Mac I am baffled how anyone can use the things.
Total frustration.

But it's all about familiarity, so you keep your whacky keyboard glyphs and neutered mouse and I'll stick to Windows.

(In fairness, I don't know where to start when faced with a Linux desktop, but at least I know my way around the interface hardware.)

I'm not talking about any particular brand of computer nor OS. I do the same thing on a Windows machine if the mouse doesn't have a third button.

But to bring up current Mac portables, the current iteration of the track-pad is infinitely more usable than anything found on an Acer, Sony, Dell, etc... Both for cursor movement as well as button presses. But looking at it, it appears to have no buttons at all.

Wait... Is tabbed browsing even supported in Windows?

I've never owned a single-button mouse by the way. Every mouse I've ever used in Mac OS has always had multiple buttons and a scroll wheel - and all the buttons and wheel have always been supported.

Matt, you may want to look into the older Revolution MX mouse if you want an upgrade from your MX1000. While it doesn't have the Darkfield tracking, it does present you with more buttons to map then the newer Performance MX.

On the top, you only have the tiny button below the scroll wheel, along with the normal left and right click. However the scroll wheel does tilt to the left and right, mappable to non scrolling functions if you want.

Then on the thumb side, you get two normal buttons, and a fixed scroll wheel like thing. It doesn't actually do continuous scrolling, instead it acts as 3 more buttons. forward, back, and then click in for the third.

The Revolution MX still has a charger base station too if you don't like the corded charger method. (irritatingly different then the MX1000 one by just enough to not charge both devices).


Indeed it is. I'll take an Apple touchpad above any other now, due to the large area, and scrolling/clicking gestures. Screw having a dedicated scrolling area, I want the entire pad to allow that function. And the weird keyboard glyphs are actually really nice when you get used to them. I find I use the keyboard way more for functions on my Mac, since it's much more consistent. Terminal window, or Safari, it's the same key combo to cut and paste. None of this "Well, here Ctrl-C copies, but here it sends an interrupt" nonsense.

Yeah, I guess, but it's not like opening links in new tabs is the only use for Button3. It's handy, but it's not my primary concern.

Are you sure you're looking at the right part? It's the part at the top of the picture, above the scroll wheel, not in the middle of the mouse. That's not a button. It's definitely smaller than a mouse button, but certainly big enough. I like it because my middle finger usually rests on the scroll wheel anyway, and all I have to do to press it is to sort of push forward with finger.


You know, I keep forgetting I can change that on the MX1000 too. I really should do that, as I've found horizontal scrolling to be pretty much useless. Perhaps I just need to up the scroll speed, but I'm sure I can find better uses for those two directions. Probably better Google Reader control


Anyway, I apologize for helping to get this discussion onto the finer-grained issues of mouse control

That have an up and down icon silkscreened onto them? Yeah. Too small. The middle mouse button is far more important to me than the wheel.

Following up on this darkfield mouse (Logitech Anywhere MX):

It's been great for a long time, and I used it all day every day at work, both at my desk and in meetings, and its first set of batteries were still going strong as of a week ago. So, battery life is great on these things.

Gotten so used to the "Freewheel" scroll wheel that I hate to use anything else.

But its wireless dongle just crapped out on me. I was getting intermittent "USB Device Not Recognized" errors for a while, and they got more and more frequent until it just stopped working altogether. (On the internet, it says that powering off the system and removing the battery will clear those errors, but that's not the case here. This is a genuine hardware failure of the dongle, not a failure of the system's USB chipset. Confirmed this by trying the dongle on several other systems.)

On the good side, Logitech is being very nice about the return process so far. My first email to them received an immediate response, and the tech who answered the email, instead of just giving a boilerplate "reinstall the drivers" response, instead said, "yup, it could be defective. Please fill out the warranty information below..."

Wow, according to an email I just received, they're mailing me a replacement unit already. Without me needing to ship back the original first.

Impressive customer service.

Just following up. Got the replacement in a fairly short time after the support emails. They never asked for the faulty one back. Now I've got two working darkfield mice, and one working USB receiver dongle.

New mouse working great.

Still on the first set of batteries (transferred from the old mouse to the new one).