“Stop the presses: Apple has discovered the right-click!” Lee Gomes “reports” for Forbes.
MacDailyNews Take: Ooh, so exciting! An article about August 2, 2005, the day on which Apple introduced their first multi-button mouse, Mighty Mouse, which allowed for “right-clicking” offering another option for Control-clicking (the same as “right-clicking”) that was introduced in Mac OS 8, released on July 26, 1997. Not sure about the need to “Stop the presses,” though, as Forbes themselves reported the launch of Apple’s multi-button Mighty Mouse on August 2, 2005.
Gomes continues, “Usually not much should be read into announcements of new peripherals from computer companies. But a new mouse from Apple is an exception, because it seems to mean the end of a lengthy period at the company in which a good idea became a bad policy.”
“One of the key ideas behind the design of the Macintosh computer in the 1980s was the mouse, which controls the cursor’s position in the two-dimensional space of the screen, and which also, by clicking, allows the user to specify some action for the computer to take,” Gomes reports. It didn’t take long for computer designers to realize that if one mouse button was good, two were better. The left button could be used to highlight something; the right, to allow the user to choose from a pop-up menu of possible actions that changed according to what was selected. And so most of the world quickly moved to two-button mice.”
Gomes “reports,” “But not Apple. Someone there early on read about some research in which computer users were said to be confused by a two-button mouse. That research, real or imagined, reinforced Steve Jobs’ predilection for a less-is-more aesthetic of computer design, which in other circumstances is an admirable trait. In this case, it robbed a generation of Apple users of a genuinely useful bit of hardware.”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s new Multi-Touch™ “Magic Mouse” that was unveiled yesterday is not Apple’s first multi-button mouse. Again: Apple’s first multi-button mouse, “Mighty Mouse,” debuted on August 2, 2005 and Macs have had “right-click” for over 12 years.
Gomes continues, “Earlier this week, though, Apple introduced a mouse… [that] simulates having two buttons; tapping in the upper left corner sends a different signal to the computer than tapping in the upper right corner, as if they were separate physical buttons. And so comes the promise of Mac users being freed from the shackles of their uni-buttoned hell.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: UFB. Five seconds of simple research of the very publication for which he’s writing could have saved Lee from being enshrined in the Moron Hall of Fame (located in Redmond, WA). Five seconds. Quick, somebody over at Forbes show Lee your new MacBook Pro with its buttonless trackpad and please have Photo Booth ready to snap a photo of his flummoxed expression for his Hall of Fame plaque. His can go right next to CNET’s Molly Wood’s.
Contact Lee Gomes:
Knowledge of the Mac before writing about it would also saved you from being enshrined in the Moron Hall of Fame (located in Redmond, WA), Lee. Five seconds.
Not wanting to read the article … Did he somehow manage to overlook all the multi-touch functionality?
No matter how stupid you think people can be, you’ll always be surprised.
Found this want ad that got this guy hired:
“Wanted: YOU TOO CAN PULL STUFF OUT OF YOUR ASS! Someone who can write stuff, not fact check or research what he or she writes. Will be paid top dollar. Experience not necessary or preferred.”
Didn’t Kensington used to sell multi-button devices long before Apple’s Mighty Mouse?
I remember using a two-button mouse with my iMac G3 (OS8.6). Must have been 1999. That right-clicked quite happily…
Molly Wood is a huge moron
AND THIS GUY GETS PAID TO WRITE?!?!?!?!?!?
there is NO excuse, what a lazy luddite
attention MDN, you missed an even bigger cock up after the jump. he thinks the multi-touch functions ‘like a trackpad’, so you don’t have to move the mouse to reposition the pointer.
Right-click never worked on my mighty mouse. I just tried it again. Again, it doesn’t work.
God I’m an idiot. I should be fired for embarrassing my company, family, and friends. I’m sorry to all of you readers, I swear I’m not this biased or incompetent. Love, lee.
er, try turning it on in system prefs
@ George – Did you adjust the settings in System Preferences? It may not be enabled by default.
George,
Have you tried going into SYSTEM PREFERENCE and under the MOUSE section, enabling the SECONDARY button?
I personally liked how one of the comments on the Forbes site said that there has been two button clicking for quite some time and then proceeded to put a link to a Forbes article from 2005 saying just as much. Thumbs up their a$$es.
” it robbed a generation of Apple users of a genuinely useful bit of hardware.”
Hardly. It simply provided an opportunity for the likes of Logitech, Kensington, and even Microsoft to sell two button mice to Mac users. Jeez, it’s not like we COULDN’T use a 2 button mouse.
Lee, you ignorant slut.
Twelve comments on the article, all negative to Gomes.
http://rate.forbes.com/comments/CommentServlet?op=cpage&sourcename=story&StoryURI=2009/10/21/peripherals-design-hardware-technology-breakthroughs-mouse.html
Reported by a high white horse souse.
It is funny that although Apple has had right click for years and have even had, now two, of their mice able to easily and naturally perform it, they never actually had a ‘right button’. It was only when they went to ‘no buttons’ that they implemented it. It’s like they have a phobia of right buttons. Maybe Steve could only sit on his left cheek when he was being potty trained.
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mighty mouse right click is turned off by default. It is interesting to note however that if you plug in a standard two button or scroll mouse to any Mac with USB (going back 10 years) right click is there and works great!
If you guys check out the article, make sure to read the comments. They are hilarious and the author of the article is getting completely blasted!
So… now I suppose the world is now wondering when Apple will “discover” the middle-click button.
In all fairness here, I have to say that MDN pointing out that Apple really made their first two-button mouse in 2005 pretty laughable. Aside from how lousy that the Mighty Mouse really is, 2005 is very late in the game to be catching up to the rest of the world. I’ve been using a two-or-more button mouse since… 1994. Probably longer. The slowness of the tech pundits in realizing Apple has had a 2-button mouse for 4 years now is eclipsed by the slowness of Apple in actually providing one.
@ myself
Make that: “I’ve been using a two-or-more button mouse since… 1989. Probably longer.” The first PC I bought then came with a 2-button mouse. And the ones I was using in college before that certainly had two.
The author also has early mouse history confused. Mouse manufacturers added second and third buttons early on, true, but it’s incorrect to say that it “didn’t take long” for interface designers to figure out what to actually do with them.
For many years the extra buttons were a solution looking for a problem — probably because it’s easy to add a button, hard to use it well. It wasn’t until Windows 95 that the “pop-up menu” notion became entrenched.
And I’m supposed to pay these clowns for their investment advice? Seriously?