2009
Magic Mouse is Magical, but Shortcomings Exposéd
So today I swung by my local Apple Store to see Apple’s latest innovation, the Magic Mouse.
Physically
It’s probably the most beautiful mouse I’ve ever seen. Not really a surprise coming from Apple, but this is not the review is about. If you want to see more pictures, go check out the photos and video on Apple’s website.
The first thing I did was pick it up. My first impression is it feels very solid and substantial, just like the iPhone did the first time I held it. It glides across the table top at the Apple Store with ease, almost like it was floating above the surface. This is actually due to special spacers on the bottom which keeps it off the table surface. I feel it fits my hand better than Apple’s old Mighty Mouse, but not as good as my current Logitech MX Revolution Cordless Laser Mouse. The magic mouse is about 1/3rd the size of the MX Revolution. It’s thinner size is actually attractive since I can just toss it into my laptop bag really quickly with ease. I find the MX Revolution too big and cumbersome most of the time, and it has more buttons than I need on a mouse.
Clicking
First off, it seems a lot of people misunderstand it’s use of multi-touch. Lots of people asked me about accidental input of fingers resting on the surface. The mouse still works just like any mouse you’ve already used before, you physically press it down to click. Much like Apple’s latest multi-touch track pads, it actually clicks down just like a normal mouse. Works quite well actually. It actually doesn’t even have a setting for “surface tap to click” like most laptop trackpads have. Apple could have included it, but I bet the mouse would be fairly hard to use if this was enabled.
Another thing of note that I noticed is that the Apple Store iMac display was already setup for two button click on the Magic Mouse. It would be fairly interesting change if Apple does this by default on all installations of the Magic Mouse. Because before now, the right click was a feature you had to enable in System Preferences.
Gestures
It has a lot of support gestures: two finger scrolling, 360 degree scrolling, zooming for photos, page flipping, etc. They all worked fairly easily, I never had to try a second time. They just felt natural, and that’s all from a few minutes of use. I even liked how the two finger scrolling had a momentum acceleration option much like the iPhone does. That’s something I want when scrolling on my MacBook trackpad now that I used it.
The only thing I was hoping for that is a key to my workflow didn’t exist. It appears as there is NO support for mapping a button (or gesture) to Exposé. Apple’s previous mouse, the Mighty Mouse, could map various button presses to Exposé/Spaces functions. But sadly the Magic Mouse could only map the right click to this, but I prefer to use my right click for right clicking. I was hoping they’d introduce three finger flicking (four fingers wouldn’t fit) much like my MacBook Trackpad does today for this type of configuration. Or replace other existing gestures as well with that functionality.
You can see here that Exposé options are missing.
Wrap Up
I am hoping that Apple add some way to do Exposé in a future update, or even the upcoming 10.6.2 update. If they do, I’ll likely go out and buy the mouse right away as I feel it’s the only deal breaker for me. If Exposé functionality on your mouse isn’t required for your day to day tasks, then I say go for it as it’s a “Magical” mouse despite that missing bit of functionality.
