Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Mighty Mouse: still very much a one-button mouse, thankfully
It's a tough call. There are almost no Mac users in the real world who have any desire whatsoever for a two-button mouse. Yet at the same time, nearly every geek on the Mac Web not only uses a two-button mouse, makes a point of overcomplicating their Mac experience by right-clicking fifty-two times per second when there are almost literally no circumstances when right-clicking would ever be needed, and worst of all, as we all know, has spent nearly every minute of the past several years of their life demanding that Apple screw up the Mac experience by moving to a two-button mouse standard. Yes, it's the same out of touch insulated geeks who have wasted an equally large portion of their lives demanding a headless iMac, and with whom the Mac platform would be so much better off without. So what should Apple do: listen to the ninety-nine percent who couldn't be happier with Apple's absolutely perfect one-button mouse, or screw things up by listening to the insulated geeks and releasing some awful two-button monstrosity that would negatively impact every single Mac user -- even those smart enough to avoid the geeks' last dubious victory, Mac mini. It's obviously a no-brainer, but for reasons which still haven't become clear, Apple has been having a hard time ignoring the goons this year. So what's it going to be: stick with what works really well, or screw everything up with a two-button mouse?
For about five incredibly disappointing minutes this morning, I was afraid it had turned out to be the latter. Sure enough, Apple has released a mouse with seemingly more buttons on it than the average keyboard, and sure enough, the tiny geek minority wasted no time in cheering what they were quite sure was another victory for their camp at the expense of the other ninety-nine percent of the population. But then I took a look at the Mighty Mouse, and to my surprise and relief, I realized something: the Mighty Mouse appears to still be very much a one-button mouse. And even better, Apple has done so in a way that has apparently managed to trick the geeks into thinking they got what they wanted (degraded user experience for all), and sent them back to their little corner where they'll stay silent until they think of some other asinine thing to begin picketing Apple for ("Apple keyboards should no longer have the letter 'R' on them" is my personal prediction -- hey, it's no stupider than the Mac mini).
So how is it that this mouse, with all its buttons and protrustions, is still a one-button mouse? Well, it would appear that Apple has taken the fundamental flaws shared by every two-button mouse ever made, and found a way to make them non-issues. This is saying a lot, as there's never been a company in history that has been able (or more accurately, willing) to make a multi-button mouse that was actually usable by humans. How horribly have all these companies gone wrong? Let's count the ways. First, there's that absolutely pointless right button. Pointless on the Mac anyway, as right-clicking is something you would never do on a Mac unless you were trying to make a point of making your Mac experience suck. Sure, there are contextual menus to be accessed, but on a Mac there's always a better way of doing things. If you're using contextual menus on a Mac on any kind of regular basis, you're either trying to show off for people (who aren't impressed), or you simply don't know how to use a Mac.
Harsh? Yep. Accurate? You bet.
Windows, of course, is a different story. The Windows interface is so crippled that you're quite often backed into a corner in which you have no choice but to right-click your way out of it. The problem is that, even on Windows, you click the main (left) button probably ten to one hundred times for every one time you click the right button. So how have mouse designers handled that? Why, they've made the two buttons equally prominent, of course. Considering the tried and true geek philosophy of burying the most important functions the most deeply, I'm surprised some of these mice don't have the right button even larger than the left, with a big red "X" pained on it.. But nonetheless, even with the two buttons equally sized and emhpasized, I've met people who've spent years struggling with finding their way around Windows because they simply could not figure out when they're supposed to click which of the two buttons. If you're so much of an insulated geek that you can't or won't believe that there are people out there all over the world who struggle with this, then you should probably just stop reading now, because you're only going to get more infuriated as we go on. But the bottom line is that, because WIndows sucks so badly that you have no choice but to right-click in some situations, and because mouse designers are such idiots that they make the right button every bit as prominent as the left button, millions of Windows users have struggled unneccessarily over the years -- and Mac users as well, for being stuck with a prominent button that's essentially pointless and almost always takes the user to an overcomplicated way of doing things.
But it doesn't end there. The scroll wheel, which in these days of ever vertically longer web pages has tended to come in more and more handy, has been implemented by mouse designers in a way that it wastes entirely too much space, and serves to divide the mouse's face up into two distinct buttons in a way that might as well read "Here's these two buttons, you should be using them both at one point or another, just don't ask us to tell you when or how often." In other words, they make it even harder for users to figure out that the left button is the "real" button and that the right button is merely an ace in the hole for Windows users and shouldn't even be there for Mac users.
So, in a word, every mouse on the market, except for Apple's one-button mouse, sucks. The right button is implemented in the manner of a cruel joke, and the scroll wheel is implemented so poorly that it cancels out any advantage that the user might gain.
Leave it to Apple, though, to figure out how to implement both of these features (and I use the term loosely) into a mouse in such a way that neither one detracts from the mouse's "real" button. For starters, the scroll wheel is not a wheel at all but instead a little tiny ball which, from what I've read so far today, scrolls just as easily as any full-size scroll wheel, and yet only takes up a fraction of the space (read: no negative impact on the mouse's one and only "real" button). And that right-click button, which shouldn't even be there on a Macintosh mouse? It's implemented in such a way that it might as well not even be there -- most Mac users will never even encounter it. Why? Because both "buttons" are hidden underneath a single cover. When the Mighty Mouse is held in your right hand, your left index finger will instinctively click the "real" button, and you won't even know that there's a right button on the other side unless A) you're a Windows user and you're desperately looking for it because Windows has trapped you yet again, or B) someone tells you it's there.
What a thing of beauty, eh? Windows users who buy the Mighty Mouse can go right on right-clicking their way through the Windows dungeon, the insulated Mac geeks can pointlessly right-click to their heart's content, and the other ninety-nine percent of Mac users will be no worse for wear, most not even aware that the idiotic second button is even there. Perhaps equally as important, recent switchers to the Mac platform who are still trying to unlearn all that Windows has wraught on them, won't be unintentionally screwing themselves by continuing to right-click on a platform in which right-clicking is a good way to waste time. Instead, they'll forget the hidden right button is even there, and they'll instead learn the real way of doing things on a Mac.
Oh, and those two buttons at the bottom of the Mighty Mouse that launch Dashboard, or send an email to a random person, or trigger a pie thrown in your face? Whatever it is that they do, they're inobtrusive enough that they're unlikely to get in the way of any real mousing. Think of them as a bonus, and one that can easily be ignored if the bonus doesn't feel like a bonus to you.
So there you have it. The Mighty Mouse is not a two-button mouse at all. Instead, it's simply the evolution of Apple's perfect one-button mouse, with a non-obtrusive scrolling mechanism, a couple of non-interfering doo-dad buttons down at the bottom, and most importantly, a right-click button that, thankfully, for all intents and purposes, does not exist. This mouse very much appears to be a usability upgrade, without any of the downsides that the geeks have been demanding all these years.
And while the geeks are never happy unless usability has been hampered, it would appear that Apple has managed to fool them into thinking that they got their crappy two-button mouse after all. That ought to be good for keeping the geeks quiet for at least a few months, which for the rest of us might be just as important as the fact that we didn't lose any usability. Just don't tell the geeks that we won and they lost, lest they come back and start demanding the removal of random letters from the keyboard after all.
And finally, there's the question of whether I'll be buying a Mighty Mouse. I very much doubt it. You see, I don't use a mouse. Rather common trait among laptop users, from what I hear.
It's a tough call. There are almost no Mac users in the real world who have any desire whatsoever for a two-button mouse. Yet at the same time, nearly every geek on the Mac Web not only uses a two-button mouse, makes a point of overcomplicating their Mac experience by right-clicking fifty-two times per second when there are almost literally no circumstances when right-clicking would ever be needed, and worst of all, as we all know, has spent nearly every minute of the past several years of their life demanding that Apple screw up the Mac experience by moving to a two-button mouse standard. Yes, it's the same out of touch insulated geeks who have wasted an equally large portion of their lives demanding a headless iMac, and with whom the Mac platform would be so much better off without. So what should Apple do: listen to the ninety-nine percent who couldn't be happier with Apple's absolutely perfect one-button mouse, or screw things up by listening to the insulated geeks and releasing some awful two-button monstrosity that would negatively impact every single Mac user -- even those smart enough to avoid the geeks' last dubious victory, Mac mini. It's obviously a no-brainer, but for reasons which still haven't become clear, Apple has been having a hard time ignoring the goons this year. So what's it going to be: stick with what works really well, or screw everything up with a two-button mouse?
For about five incredibly disappointing minutes this morning, I was afraid it had turned out to be the latter. Sure enough, Apple has released a mouse with seemingly more buttons on it than the average keyboard, and sure enough, the tiny geek minority wasted no time in cheering what they were quite sure was another victory for their camp at the expense of the other ninety-nine percent of the population. But then I took a look at the Mighty Mouse, and to my surprise and relief, I realized something: the Mighty Mouse appears to still be very much a one-button mouse. And even better, Apple has done so in a way that has apparently managed to trick the geeks into thinking they got what they wanted (degraded user experience for all), and sent them back to their little corner where they'll stay silent until they think of some other asinine thing to begin picketing Apple for ("Apple keyboards should no longer have the letter 'R' on them" is my personal prediction -- hey, it's no stupider than the Mac mini).
So how is it that this mouse, with all its buttons and protrustions, is still a one-button mouse? Well, it would appear that Apple has taken the fundamental flaws shared by every two-button mouse ever made, and found a way to make them non-issues. This is saying a lot, as there's never been a company in history that has been able (or more accurately, willing) to make a multi-button mouse that was actually usable by humans. How horribly have all these companies gone wrong? Let's count the ways. First, there's that absolutely pointless right button. Pointless on the Mac anyway, as right-clicking is something you would never do on a Mac unless you were trying to make a point of making your Mac experience suck. Sure, there are contextual menus to be accessed, but on a Mac there's always a better way of doing things. If you're using contextual menus on a Mac on any kind of regular basis, you're either trying to show off for people (who aren't impressed), or you simply don't know how to use a Mac.
Harsh? Yep. Accurate? You bet.
Windows, of course, is a different story. The Windows interface is so crippled that you're quite often backed into a corner in which you have no choice but to right-click your way out of it. The problem is that, even on Windows, you click the main (left) button probably ten to one hundred times for every one time you click the right button. So how have mouse designers handled that? Why, they've made the two buttons equally prominent, of course. Considering the tried and true geek philosophy of burying the most important functions the most deeply, I'm surprised some of these mice don't have the right button even larger than the left, with a big red "X" pained on it.. But nonetheless, even with the two buttons equally sized and emhpasized, I've met people who've spent years struggling with finding their way around Windows because they simply could not figure out when they're supposed to click which of the two buttons. If you're so much of an insulated geek that you can't or won't believe that there are people out there all over the world who struggle with this, then you should probably just stop reading now, because you're only going to get more infuriated as we go on. But the bottom line is that, because WIndows sucks so badly that you have no choice but to right-click in some situations, and because mouse designers are such idiots that they make the right button every bit as prominent as the left button, millions of Windows users have struggled unneccessarily over the years -- and Mac users as well, for being stuck with a prominent button that's essentially pointless and almost always takes the user to an overcomplicated way of doing things.
But it doesn't end there. The scroll wheel, which in these days of ever vertically longer web pages has tended to come in more and more handy, has been implemented by mouse designers in a way that it wastes entirely too much space, and serves to divide the mouse's face up into two distinct buttons in a way that might as well read "Here's these two buttons, you should be using them both at one point or another, just don't ask us to tell you when or how often." In other words, they make it even harder for users to figure out that the left button is the "real" button and that the right button is merely an ace in the hole for Windows users and shouldn't even be there for Mac users.
So, in a word, every mouse on the market, except for Apple's one-button mouse, sucks. The right button is implemented in the manner of a cruel joke, and the scroll wheel is implemented so poorly that it cancels out any advantage that the user might gain.
Leave it to Apple, though, to figure out how to implement both of these features (and I use the term loosely) into a mouse in such a way that neither one detracts from the mouse's "real" button. For starters, the scroll wheel is not a wheel at all but instead a little tiny ball which, from what I've read so far today, scrolls just as easily as any full-size scroll wheel, and yet only takes up a fraction of the space (read: no negative impact on the mouse's one and only "real" button). And that right-click button, which shouldn't even be there on a Macintosh mouse? It's implemented in such a way that it might as well not even be there -- most Mac users will never even encounter it. Why? Because both "buttons" are hidden underneath a single cover. When the Mighty Mouse is held in your right hand, your left index finger will instinctively click the "real" button, and you won't even know that there's a right button on the other side unless A) you're a Windows user and you're desperately looking for it because Windows has trapped you yet again, or B) someone tells you it's there.
What a thing of beauty, eh? Windows users who buy the Mighty Mouse can go right on right-clicking their way through the Windows dungeon, the insulated Mac geeks can pointlessly right-click to their heart's content, and the other ninety-nine percent of Mac users will be no worse for wear, most not even aware that the idiotic second button is even there. Perhaps equally as important, recent switchers to the Mac platform who are still trying to unlearn all that Windows has wraught on them, won't be unintentionally screwing themselves by continuing to right-click on a platform in which right-clicking is a good way to waste time. Instead, they'll forget the hidden right button is even there, and they'll instead learn the real way of doing things on a Mac.
Oh, and those two buttons at the bottom of the Mighty Mouse that launch Dashboard, or send an email to a random person, or trigger a pie thrown in your face? Whatever it is that they do, they're inobtrusive enough that they're unlikely to get in the way of any real mousing. Think of them as a bonus, and one that can easily be ignored if the bonus doesn't feel like a bonus to you.
So there you have it. The Mighty Mouse is not a two-button mouse at all. Instead, it's simply the evolution of Apple's perfect one-button mouse, with a non-obtrusive scrolling mechanism, a couple of non-interfering doo-dad buttons down at the bottom, and most importantly, a right-click button that, thankfully, for all intents and purposes, does not exist. This mouse very much appears to be a usability upgrade, without any of the downsides that the geeks have been demanding all these years.
And while the geeks are never happy unless usability has been hampered, it would appear that Apple has managed to fool them into thinking that they got their crappy two-button mouse after all. That ought to be good for keeping the geeks quiet for at least a few months, which for the rest of us might be just as important as the fact that we didn't lose any usability. Just don't tell the geeks that we won and they lost, lest they come back and start demanding the removal of random letters from the keyboard after all.
And finally, there's the question of whether I'll be buying a Mighty Mouse. I very much doubt it. You see, I don't use a mouse. Rather common trait among laptop users, from what I hear.
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