I’ve never, ever clicked the scroll wheel button. I also never use the extra 4th and 5th buttons that you find on the sides of some of the higher end mice.
The most annoying thing is having extra buttons that you don’t use but accidentally click when you aren’t meaning to. That drives me crazy!
I’m using a keyboard right now with a zoom slider to the left of the keys, hadn’t occurred to me that it was conceptually the precursor to the mouse wheel.
If I remember correctly, Eric was also responsible for some of the earliest “terminate and stay resident” applications from Borland, before he moved to Microsoft.
And I know he is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet.
There are a number of trackballs with mouse wheels out there, though
Microsoft specifically seems to have phased trackballs out of their
lineup
The Kensington Expert Mouse is a trackball with a scroll/zoom wheel, although not the conventional scroll wheel. It’s more of a dial around the trackball.
That’s worth mentioning – that Apple has been so long
in adopting a 2-button mouse. If you didn’t know it by
someone telling you, Macs still don’t have a 2-button
mouse that ships with the computer by default. The action
of the second (invisible) button on the Mighty Mouse is
set to “Primary Button” when you get your new Mac.
The lack of respect for even a second button on the Mac
has always confounded me.
Be confounded no more. Take a look at the 90% of the users who use a computer. See how your grandmother uses her mouse. For these people, two buttons are confusing. I know a lot of people who switch the mouse between hands, and suddenly the “mouse doesn’t work”. They really have no idea what the “Select” button on the mouse is for, and never use it.
Apple figured that those who want two or more mouse buttons (Mac OS X is Unix based, and Unix’s traditional mouse is three buttons) will buy the mouse they really like. This is pretty much true. I have rarely used the “default” mouse on any computer I’ve bought, Linux, Mac, or Windows.
I bought the Mighty Mouse which I use on both Windows and Mac. I like the scroll ball because it also allows me to scroll left and right. I’ve never got use to the push scroll wheel feature of the Microsoft mouse (where you can scroll real fast), and the left right toggle of the scroll wheel on my Logitech mouse feels weird. I think we’ll start to see scroll wheels on more and more mice.
Eric was completely fixated on the idea that the wheel should be for zooming by default, but finally relented when he met resistance from legendary technology journalist Walt Mossberg. Before they shipped it, they added a button under the wheel, and made the default wheel action “scroll”.
Another pivotal moment in Microsoft history. They insist on creating a feature that no one has asked for and ignore the obvious feature (Scrolling) and by sheer dumb luck, get it right.
My how things have changed. They’ve run out of dumb luck lately. 
Toni wrote:
“I still miss the precision of the Trackball at times.”
Vizeroth wrote:
"[…]most of the Logitech trackballs are not quite useful for me (after all, my thumb is useless for moving the pointer on the screen)."
having used logitech trackballs for a long time, i can say they are pretty precise when moving the cursor along the screen. i also particularly liked being able to “throw” the ball to cover a long distance (that even became my favorite anti-stress gadget).
unfortunately a thumb-moved trackball is extremely dangerous: the wrist is suffering and you can easily get the carpal tunnel syndrome. that’s why i am glad the mouse wheel rendered the trackball obsolete.
not that the mouse is not dangerous, but the effort is less painful than with a trackball…
On the one-button mouse:
I understand why Apple chose the one-button mouse. It made a lot of sense when I was first introduced to it back in '84 (I was eight years old then). But let’s ask ourselves this question: What does the single button on the mouse primarily represent? The scroll wheel is primarily used for scrolling. The right mouse button is primarily used for getting a context menu. As Bruce Tognazzini once put it, the button on the mouse (and I think he was generalizing across ALL mice here) is equivalent to a “caveman’s grunt”.
That’s not a very empowering paradigm for users, whether it be your grandma or a developer.
Imagine a new user who is faced with a desktop, and on this desktop is a file. How does the user delete the file? How does the user open the file? How does the user print the file? Without some sort of easily accessible mechanism for contextually choosing an action, it’s a mystery.
Mike: I’d be willing to bet that Grandma has a problem right-clicking because you tell her to “right-click”, and not “click the mouse button on the right”. The solution to computer illiteracy is to learn, not to cut the capabilities of the system for everyone. That’s the triumph of ignorance.
Zooming? And he was right… that’s why most RPG games uses it that way.
At hardcore-input needs, we can see who is leaded by reason and who is leaded by marketing issues.
I’d agree that the scroll wheel is a great innovation, but the optical mouse is great too, it’s hard to go back to using the mechanical ones (like the one included with my Dell…)
The 2D scroll ball in the Apple Mighty Mouse is awesome too… that is, when it’s not clogged. Unfortunately it exhibits the same issues as old school mouse balls (hehe, mouse balls), i.e. dust and crap clogging it up. And even worse there’s no easy way to clean it.
I’m gotten to the point where I disassemble the mouse about once a month to clean it (not a particularly easy task: snap the top shell off, unscrew 3 tiny screws holding the scroll ball assembly in, snap the assembly apart, clean ball and rollers, carefully reassemble tiny rollers + ball + holder, screw the 3 screws back in, snap shut…) I’ve gotten pretty good at it so it takes less than 5 minutes, but still…
But why three buttons … I only use 2 (and if I could would only use 1)
Mouse click opens a new tab in browsers… I wouldn’t trade that 3rd button for anything.
@ Jaser
But why three buttons … I only use 2 (and if I could would only use 1)
I use my mouse for gaming, in which I have 7 buttons which all have some function mapped to them in the game. However, in the normal world I use left click, right click and scroll only.
My old mouse is a Logitech MX500 with 7 buttons and a clickable scroll wheel. My new mouse is a Logitech Revolution MX, which added a pseudo-scroll wheel on the side (but out of the reach of my thumb) and took away 3 buttons.
I find that I really like the feel of the Revolution, as in my wrist hurts less these past couple weeks, but I really, really miss those extra buttons. One nice thing with the Revolution is that the main scroll wheel can be pushed left or right and scrolls sideways. I still miss two of the buttons though, becuase you could hold them down to scroll up/down which was easier on the finger for long scrolls.
All that just gave me an idea: How about a mousewheel with four buttons around it! Left/Right buttons would scroll sideways, top/bottom buttons would scroll up/down. They would probably have to be part of the molding for the scroll wheel, actually… and maybe pressing sideways on the scroll wheel could activate the same mechanism or actually push those buttons down.
Any mouse-makers out there? Go build that for me!
The middle button is used all the time in X, that select (left), copy (right), paste (middle) thing is both faster and easier on the carpel tunnel than ctrl-c, ctrl-v.
I can understand the simplicity argument with the Mac, but it boggles my mind that if I buy a Mac laptop I can’t work with the X programs it runs like I would on other hardware (without an external mouse). Why don’t they just put a 2-button mouse on there and default both buttons to “primary” like the Mighty Mouse? Then power users could customize their settings (enabling secondary click and middle-click emulation) and work more efficiently.
“Reader without a website”:
I don’t know about a trackball, but IBM in 1997 or so (soon after the mouse wheel came out) came out with a mouse with one of their pencil erasor tracking devices where the scroll wheel was on the MS ones.
I didn’t ever use one, but I do remember thinking it was kind of a neat concept. It must have been bad in real world use because they dropped it soon thereafter
I have had to cut the cord connecting the “pencil eraser” mouse on numerous laptops. Once it starts to “drift” you will go crazy!
The IBM trackpoint mouse:
Here’s a 1997 IBM study on scrolling methods. The results are kind of questionable in my opinion (no difference between mouse without wheel, and mouse with wheel??) since IBM tends to be biased toward their trackpoint device…
Navigating through on-line documents has become an increasingly common task in human- computer interaction. This paper investigates alternative methods to improve user performance for browsing World Wide Web and other documents. In a task that involved both scrolling and pointing, we compared three input methods against the status quo. The results showed that a mouse with a finger wheel did not improve user’s performance; two other methods, namely a mouse with an isometric rate-control joystick operated by the same hand and a two-handed system that put a mouse in the dominant hand and a joystick in the other, both significantly improved users’ performance. A human factors analysis of each of the three input methods is presented.
I am always frustrated by apps where the wheel should be bound to zoom rather than scroll.
It’s also somewhat sad that we must still waste so much screen real-estate on scroll bars that now serve a dimished purpose.
The mouse wheel is a nice invention, and especially the ability to click it and use it as a third mouse button. Sadly logitech has ruined that by making their mice wheels scroll sideways by clicking them left and right thereby making it harder to click straight down as a middle click…
Mice with a pointing stick (“Trackpoint”) are similar to and I think probably better than scroll-wheel mice. I’m not sure they predate scroll-wheel mice, though; the pointing stick is pre-'93 but I don’t know when it first appeared on a mouse.
