Recently, Pasha chomped my Revolution MX. Of course, the one thing she damaged was the mouse’s best feature, the free-spin scroll wheel. So, I decided to try a Magic Mouse as a replacement. Here are a few impressions after a week.
The good:
- The tracking seems very accurate, and the pointer motion is the smoothest I’ve seen in a bluetooth mouse. The mouse glides easily on most relatively smooth surfaces.
- Vertical and horizontal scrolling, with momentum is nothing short of pure awesome.
- The click has a crisp, intentional feel, and right-clicking works well (I never had a problem with right-clicking on the Mighty Mouse either, so YMMV!)
- No dongle! And it seems to reconnect instantly even after sitting unused for hours
- I love the simple preference pane with the embedded movie showing how to use the mouse. Of course, one could argue that if a mouse requires that you watch a movie to know how to use it, it’s too hard to use.
- The profile is just too low. Maybe I’m still missing the Revo MX, but there’s really no way for me to rest my palm on the Magic Mouse. Consequently, I have noticed a bit more hand fatigue.
- The two-finger left-right swipe gestures are hard. I don’t think human anatomy was meant to do these while grasping something! I have to release the mouse entirely with my ring and pinky fingers to make these gestures reliably. I really like the idea, and the effect, but I think they are just too hard.
- From a nerd perspective, I wish I could map new and different gestures using the preference page. There’s MagicDriver, so I may give it a try. That said, I understand (and usually agree with) Apple’s choices to keep things simple.