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: