the reason that the three button mouse never caught on is because retards designed it. With a two button mouse your first finger is on button one and your second finger is on button two. With three button mice your first finger is still on button one (good), your second finger is on button three (very bad) and your third finger is on button two (bad).
Imagine swapping the function of the mouse and the scroll wheel or embedded trackball-- moving the mouse pans the whole window, while the trackpall/scrollwheels move the pointer. This would be like the mini-joysticks that are on the end of regular joysticks, where the main joystick navigates the vehicle while the mini joystick aims your missile or whatever.
You could do this swap in software. Anyone know if there’s a way this might be done either in Windows or Linux?
Reed
“I am always frustrated by apps where the wheel should be bound to zoom rather than scroll.”
I’m frustrated in general with the difficulty of remapping mice buttons and other similar features.
I once bought a Microsoft keyboard with a slider thingy on the left of the Tab key. They hard coded it to zoom. I bought it on the assumption that I would be able to remap it to be a “scrollwheel” instead, where I thought it might be useful to scroll around with an analog control without going to the mouse. No such luck.
And while most mice nowadays have at least some configurability, I still find a shocking number of them won’t let me bind a (shell) command to a button, which lets me make it really useful.
scroll bars that now serve a dimished purpose.
They’re still useful, of course, for indicating position and how much content is available.
Funny coincidence, but back in 1990, I was working with the mac classic machines in one of our University labs (in CMichU) and I got really frustrated with the fact that you had to select the sidebar in the gui and scroll, get to the bottom of the mousepad, pick it up go to the top of the pad and drag some more (obviously I was too new at this because I think the interface allowed clicking in the empty space and advancing 1 page per such click).
In any case, I played around with the idea of a “slider” by the side of the only button that the Mac mouse used to have. This was to be spring loaded and would only control scrolling up or down (from the middle). I recall making a diagram of it, but never followed up…
coulda, shoulda, woulda LOL!
“I like the scroll-ball on Apple’s dreadfully-named Might-Mouse for just that reason.”
Dreadfully named? BTW, it’s Mighty Mouse. It’s not a bad name, better then for instance “iMouse”.
“I wonder why they haven’t put a little trackball on a mouse where the scroll wheel is. I imagine it would be easier to use than the side tilting style scroll wheel and offer the same function.”
They have, it’s called the Apple Mighty Mouse. It’s really useful, especially for Video Editing in Final Cut Pro, scrolling left-right is a huge part of your work flow for that program.
Yeah, lay off the mighty-mouse, it’s pretty decent. Having a full-fledged trackball on top is quite a bit more powerful than just a wheel – it’s a whole 'nother dimension of scrolling goodness!
I do prefer a more ergonomic fit, but you can’t do that and still be left/right-hand agnostic, so I can understand they don’t want to go that route with the default equipment.
With Apple’s recent foray into touch-sensitive technology, I wonder if we’re going to see a trackpad-style interface, where you just stroke the top of the mouse to scroll… would be interesting.
I love the logitech mice. Always good.
I like the scroll wheel with the left/right horizontal scrolling like mine:
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/details/US/EN,CRID=3,CONTENTID=9340
I don’t like side-mounted mouse buttons (for back/forwards etc) because I end up clicking the involuntarily, and messing things up.
Acorn’s RISC OS machines use a 3-button mouse, the middle brings up the menu for whichever application is under the pointer.
RISC OS also lets you pan around all over a document by holding the right button (named “adjust”) on a scroll bar, then moving the mouse around. This was unbelievably useful when navigating around large vector drawings, and it’s a feature I’ve never seen on any other OS.
For me the classic Logitech mouse is perfect. No more and no less than what I use daily.
Middle clicking is a great tool for “that second commonly used action”. Take links in Firefox/IE7/Opera (I think) for example. The most commonly used action is to follow the link, so that’s left click. The second most commonly used action (of which I use a lot of the time) is to open in a new tab. Now that’s middle click. And of course we have right click for “a list of any other actions” in a context menu. Same with tabs - left click to navigate to tab, middle to close. I wish I could map middle click to something in explorer, like “Open With…”.
I have a personal dislike of more than 3 button mice. I always end up inadvertently pressing them, or forgetting what they do. In Firefox of course there are two very common actions - navigating back and forwards. For that I use rocker gestures (click left then right to go forward. right then left to go back). I’ve found them to become very natural now, and it doesn’t clutter up my mouse. However, I do realise that rocker gestures are a specialised action that a lot of people struggle to get to grips with.
I’ve never had a real need to scroll horizontally. Most of the time I only need to go up or down. If I ever do need to go horizontally it tends to be when writing (programming mainly) and I’m tracking with the caret anyway (Ctrl+Arrows rock). For the times I do need to go horizontally I find the middle click scrolling (where the view scrolls at a rate and direction proportional to where you move the mouse) to be sufficient. Then again I middle click scroll down pages a lot of the time anyway.
I’m surprised it’s not been bought up before, but Jeff Raskin, the main person responsible for the one button mice on Macs, admits in his book “The Humane Interface” that a two button mice would perhaps have been better, given the proviso that it is clearly labelled.
And I think that is the problem. As David said, the “right mouse button” conjours in a lot of peoples mind the “correct mouse button”, which to most newcomers is the left mouse button. If the buttons were labelled something like “Action” and “Menu” (with better names obviously) and had a consistent function it would be a lot easier for people to understand. “Click the Menu button. It’s the one on the right with ‘Menu’ written on it.”
[ICR]:
Great comment. I never really thought about that. Isn’t it funny that mouse buttons are almost never labeled? I guess it goes back to the whole “grunt” argument. When I’m coding, I always tell folks when they come up with class names, “If you can’t find a name for it, you probably haven’t designed it right”. Wonder if that applies to the mouse, too.
Around this time, the hardware guys came back and said that they had
considered adding a wheel to the mouse, but they didn’t know what it
would be used for
so Eric Michelman didn’t actually come up with the idea for the mouse wheel, just what to use it for…so who invented the actual mouse wheel I wonder?
From what I can find, the first mouse wheel was made by Mouse Systems in 1995. They had been acquired by KYE (Genius in Taiwan) in 1990 so I don’t know who gets the real credit.
I think Apple has the right design. Making it a one-button mouse by default means that only the people who know how to reconfigure the mouse are the ones who have to do it. If grandma doesn’t understand right-clicking, she certainly isn’t going to understand Preferences or the Control Panel. The little scroll wheel not only lets you scroll horizontally and vertically, it also lets you scroll diagonally. I’ve never seen another mouse do that. There probably is one; I’ve just never seen it.
The weakness of the Mighty Mouse is that right-clicking is different than on other mice. You have to lift your left finger while you are clicking–not hard, but you have to get used to it. The scroll button is very sensitive, and the side buttons are not sensitive enough. Nevertheless, I do like it because it doesn’t look like it’s going to assimilate me into the Borg.
Bill Buxton notes that there was a Japanese-Swiss thumbwheel mouse called Mighty Mouse back in 1985 (Ohno, Fukaya Nievergeld, 1985) and Dan Venolia produced a thumb wheel mouse at Apple between '89 and '93. So that would explain the lack of MS patents, as well as the name for the Apple Mighty Mouse. See www.billbuxton.com/input02.Devices.pdf [PDF file].
The scroll wheel’s button function IS used in Windows. With IntelliPoint under XP pressing this third mouse button displays all open windows.
In applications, it offers another scrolling function. Clicking the third button (scroll wheel) sets an origin point on the screen and moving the cursor from this point will scroll content in that direction. The further the cursor from this point the faster the scrolling. This feature is quite old now, it’s not no good as Copper says.
At the start of this article the Genius mouse is mentioned as the earliest found with a scroll wheel (confirmed by other sources). This is noted as the first mouse with a scroll wheel, while it is the Microsoft IntelliMouse noted for the first scroll wheel as it is now recognised.
For those mentioning mouse wheel button = new tab → try ctrl + left click. shift + left click is a great boon when being forced to use older browsers.
On some level, I understand Macs staying true to one mouse button - when the first Macs came out, mice (probably of the Xerox PARC vintage) had multiple buttons and you’d use one button to select, another button to copy and yet another to paste (or so internet led me to believe; it’s been forever since I saw videos of Engelbart in action to confirm this myself). The idea that you could select, copy and paste all with one button was one part of a larger (design) revolution.
People will say that they want more buttons, more features, but how many people are screaming for Apple to bring back the iPod with the discrete play/skip buttons? I remember seeing one of them and being taken a bit aback by how awkward it looked.
I can’t live without my 5 button mouse, my mom doesn’t get excited about source control systems. I’m a developer, she’s not, and there are more moms and people who appreciate simplicity than there are developers out there.
Interesting…see I always blamed the Internet for the “need” of a trackball. Remember when all those web pages where just horrendous single pages with hopefully a few anchors in there to help you navigate through the mess. When I started seeing scroll wheels, I just naturally assumed it was to help in those situations. Maybe I spend too much time online 8^D
I actually hated my first scroll wheel (back in '97 I think with my new Compaq) and gave it to my friend. My hand would rest so heavy on the mouse that I would arbitrarily spin the wheel and lose my place.
Now I can’t live without it 8^D That and my trackball, I still love that too 8^D
Apple did, in 2005:
Has some cleaning issues with gunk in the trackball though, which leads us to the Magic Mouse in 2009: