Steven Bennett writes: | You know, it's amazing that people still have this silly impression that | just because Apple only ships a mouse with one button, that the OS can only | use one button, something which hasn't been true for many years. I've been | using multi-button mice on Macs since the late 80s. My main mouse (actually | a trackball) has 4 buttons plus a scroll wheel. *All* of them are useful | out of the box with the OS. With the driver software installed, they're | even more useful.
My wife likes to tell people about the 16-button mice she used back when she was still doing Civil Engineering work. Those mice also had a small reticle on the front, for help in digitizing maps. They worked fine on both Apple and Microsoft systems. Of course, most of the software didn't have anything bound to most of the buttons. But any CAD software knows how to use them. It can be really handy to be able to map an arbitrary command to a button. It is a bit odd that Apple still prefers one-button mice. You'd think that 3 would be a minimum, considering the nature of the human hand. Of course, as musicians, it would also be handy if we could plug in keyboards designed to mimic our favorite instruments. There are USB piano-style keyboards, of course, but I haven't yet seen one that looks and acts like a fiddle fingerboard. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
