Magic Mouse

My current mouse was not good at scrolling, so I decided to buy Apple's Magic Mouse. Yes, my "old" mouse is still working, so I should not have bought a new one (but in fact I'm still using it).

As usual with Apple, it's a nice piece of hardware and as usual with Apple, it's sucking in some ways.

It's a beautiful mouse, with its complete surface being tactile. I bought it because my previous mice was not scrolling correctly. Does the magic mouse does the job correctly? Yes. Scrolling is very nice. And with the momentum option activated it's even better.

Some people are complaining because the edges are a bit too sharp, in fact I didn't noticed it before reading it, but yes, a bit smoother would be better.

Some other people are complaining that the cursor's movements on the screen are not fluid. I had the same problem from time to time and the simple solution was to have the mouse closer to my laptop, I reduced the distance from 1 meter to 50cm. Yes it's lame, it's bluetooth, I experienced the same problem with an other bluetooth mouse. And bluetooth is also slow, it introduce a latency in cursor's movements that you can feel when switching from a wired mouse to a bluetooth one, but it's small enough to go unnoticed after few minutes.

An other thing is that you can't do the nice gestures you can do on the trackpad. You can download MagicPrefs which enables lot's of gestures, but in fact I found it quite awkward and difficult to do most of the gestures on the mouse.

Forget about gaming. Of course this mouse is not designed for hardcore gamers, even for gamers at all. The simple fact is you can't do left and right click at the same time (you were thinking about jumping and firing at the same time in QUAKE LIVE? So that's why I'm still using my old mouse when I want to play).

But to me, the major problem is that the mouse is way too slow. And it looks like a lot of people think the same.

Even when putting the track speed to the maximum, the magic mouse is still a bit too slow. Interestingly, when removing the drivers, the mouse is way much faster but no more scrolling or gestures… which was the point of buying this mouse. MagicPrefs allows you to increase the speed a bit, looks like MouseZoom do the same as well. But I don't really like the idea to have to install an extra software to increase the speed. I should be able to set it directly somewhere. Some people are giving some commands like this one:

$ write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling -float 5.0

It seems that it's the value written in the system when changing the track speed. In the System Preferences the max value seems to be "3". So with this command you can set it to a higher value. But each time you have to log out and log in!

If you have to do it only once, it may do the trick. But here I come to an other problem. Let's imagine I want to play on some games requiring a "classical" mouse, I need to change the tracking speed to a lower value for the "gaming" mouse and when I'm not playing anymore, change back the value… with the command line, and logging out, then logging in…

I already talked about it, but why operating systems are designed for only one mouse and one keyboard?

Have a look at this (from Mac OS X System Preferences):

What do you notice? We can configure several displays, but only one keyboard, one mouse and one trackpad… One mouse and one trackpad? Those are two point and click devices, aren't they? So in a way we can have two different pointing devices with different settings, so why limiting this difference by "kind" (mouse/trackpad) and not by plugged devices?

Only few people are using more than one of these devices? OK maybe, and most people are also using only one display… and most people I know using a laptop as their main computer plug an external keyboard, so they have the laptop keyboard (and trackpad) and the external keyboard (and mouse) and usually laptop keyboards and standalone keyboards are different and may require different configurations. And of course the case when pair programming.

Mice and keyboards are not dead yet (they are not going to be wiped-out by touchscreens and virtual keyboards before long (in the end they may, but not before at least a decade or two)). So please, you people writing operating systems, would you be nice enough to handle that problem?

Conclusion

After few days using the Magic Mouse, I can say that I found it being a nice device in general, a very good mouse for common usages, not suitable at all for games and way too slow (a fix for that should be trivial to release).