The Mighty Mouse by Apple: Right Click with Glee

When Apple released the Mighty Mouse, I was ecstatic that they were finally admitting that right-clicking is the way of the future. Of course, ever since OS 8.6 and possibly before, you could CTRL-click for a right-click type menu, but it’s infinitely easier to have right-click functions available where they belong – under the middle finger of your right hand. Before the Mighty Mouse, I had been using a Microsoft Explorer USB optical mouse. It offered me two buttons on top, two buttons on the side, used mainly for web navigation, and a scroll wheel. This setup was perfect for my needs.

As an Apple fan, I felt it necessary to check out their venture into two-button mousing, and I purchased the Mighty Mouse and shelved my Explorer. Overall I am very happy with the Mighty Mouse, but have a few gripes. The first is that I wish that the squeeze function and the press-the-scroll-ball function were more versatile. I am not a big Dashboard user, so the on-mouse Dashboard functionality is fairly useless for me.

I really do like the scroll ball though. It is nice to be able to scroll not only up and down, but left and right also. The problem is that the scroll ball is so small that it gets dirty fairly quickly, and starts to stick. Mine is unfortunately now at a point where the up and down scrolling will not work at all.

I certainly applaud Apple for their first two-button mouse effort, and am glad to see them openly embracing the all-important right-click functionality of modern operating systems. Although I am back to using with my Microsoft Explorer mouse, I will be excited to see what Apple comes up with as their next mouse trick, and will absolutely give it a try.