I ordered the new Magic Mouse as soon as they announced it. I was longing to replace my broken Mighty Mouse (the wheel got too dirty it stopped working, and yes I tried the paper cleaning). It arrived yesterday in a cute little box (with batteries included!).
The normal pairing procedure worked out of the box, nothing fancy here (that’s what I love about Apple), and a new “Mouse” icon appears in your System Preferences panel. The big difference with the rest of the mouse out there is that there are no buttons. The whole mouse is a big touch surface. This might sound confusing, but its not a first with apple (Mighty mouse also had touch left/right click).
First of all, I liked the footprint of the mouse, its small and relatively thin, so you can carry it around easily. I have really big hands, yet it fits alright in my palm. The right/left click works as you expect: you click the left-side its left-click, you click the right-side its right click. Now, here comes the fun part: scrolling! When you keep your finger in the mouse surface and move it around, its scrolls 360 degrees with you. It replaces that small ball the Mighty mouse had (which was good, but a pain in the ass as it got dirty), with much bigger space to move your finger. The whole movement comes really natural, and you get used to it right away. No learning curve at all.
I also liked the “two-fingers swipe” gesture. It gets handy when you are navigating through a multipage document and again its really comfortable to use, as your two fingers are always only mouse, as I again used to for expose (show desktop). However, I believe that therer are a lot of possibilities and options on what you can do with a multitouch mouse, so I guess Apple might introduce new gestures later on (eg. keep two fingers pressed for a second for expose or something), or even do a twirl for refreshing a page in a browser. The possibilities are endless. I really hope that Apple opens up the API for this mouse, so developers can create gestures for their applications or listen to events generated by the mouse.
Overall, I am really pleased with it. It fits well with my Apple wireless keyboard. The only negative point is the price: 55 GBP for a mouse is a lot.
November 6th, 2009 at 11:05 am
I got the Magic Mouse yesterday… i find it a bit too small (thin) and it doesn’t fit in my hand as a logitech mouse would do. Also, it’s a few buttons short:)
BUT, the scrolling is wonderful.
Regarding opening the mouse’s API… come on… it’s Apple we are talking about
November 6th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
I don’t really mind the thinness, I actually welcome it. I guess that’s personal taste.
I don’t think that opening the API would be so extreme. I don’t mean opening the hardware API allowing to mouse to work on other Operating Systems, but allow a gesture recognition API to be used from the apps. Also consider that they have a bunch of notebooks now that do support multitouch in a very large touchpad (when comparing with the rest of the industry), so I believe that a logical step to take. The gesture API for both the mouse and the touchpads should be the same, so no complexities or small user base to ignore it. Maybe not in Snow Leopard, but I think we’ll see it in the next big cat iteration.
November 7th, 2009 at 7:41 am
I got my magic mouse last week. I actually walked into a shopping centre in London thinking I would buy a 5 pound mouse =) Silly me to stumble across an apple store.
I walked in, saw it, felt it and bought it. Student discount will get you a nice 10 pound shave off the price.
I haven’t looked into the technical details of the touch interface however if it does support more than the simple scrolling and swiping, then at some point more is obvious to come for this. It looks as though it was a rather hasty move from Apple, thus it is apparent that more should be pushed through (this is usually correlated with sales milestones).
The precision is also something to talk about. Laser really does help in this case. Everything else is up to your mouse settings really.
Overall I am also happy since a small and sleek mouse can accommodate my large hands. It works nicely in Linux (no scrolling if I remember correctly) and it looks damn nice next to my new mac book pro.
My 2p.
Mario.
November 7th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Congrats guys with your new toys
I’m still thinking about buying one. So are there any confirmed ‘hacks’/'mods’ available to enable middle click ? There are some applications floating around that say that they can enable middle click. Did any of you guys managed to get it to work ?
I can live without the side buttons of my mighty mouse but I don’t think I can live without the middle click!
November 7th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
For precision I didn’t see any difference with the bluetooth mighty mouse or from my Logitech (actually the logitech has higher DPI, so I guess is more precise? I don’t play games on the Mac anyway).
I haven’t looked around yet for 3rd party applications, but I do not see a reason why not.
Also something I noticed: 75% of the mouse’s surface is touch. It stops just above the Apple logo on the mouse. Nifty!