Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Attack of the Mice!

I just went out and bought a Microsoft Blue­tooth some­thing some­thing 5000, and a Log­itech MX Rev­o­lu­tion. I’ve grown tired of this old Log­itech two but­tons plus scroll wheel, cord­ed opti­cal mouse, and want­ed to retire it.

The first reac­tion when I talk about mice, espe­cial­ly with Mac own­ers, is “Why not Mighty Mouse?” There’s two big rea­sons I hate it:

1. The ergonom­ics. The mouse is too flat for my hand to be com­fort­able when I pick it up to move it. I eyed the Tar­gus mouse @lapcat tweet­ed about a few days ago, but it seemed too flat to be usable, and the store’s return pol­i­cy did­n’t let me open it and return it if I did­n’t like it.

2. The right-click. On nor­mal mice with two but­tons, you can leave your hand as-is, and depress the right mouse but­ton to get a right click. Not so with the Mighty Mouse: if you leave your fin­ger on the left side of the mouse, the hard­ware decides that you meant to left click. This means you have to LIFT your left but­ton fin­ger up, and click with your right but­ton fin­ger, to get a right click. What a ridicu­lous way to oper­ate a mouse.

I’m black­balling the Microsoft Blue­tooth mouse. While Blue­tooth is nice, the mouse is much too small (see #1 above), so it’s out.

I’m lov­ing the MX: it’s got more but­tons than most key­boards, the scroll wheels (there’s two, and the main one even does side-to-side scrolling!) are fan­tas­tic, and it fits my hand like a glove. It runs on an inter­nal recharge­able bat­tery, and comes with a desk­top charg­er, so I don’t have to screw around with a AA or AAA bat­tery charger.

I’m about to install the Log­itech soft­ware (which I’ve heard very mixed reviews about), since I’m real­ly look­ing to pro­gram the oth­er scroll wheel and the for­ward and back but­tons (USB Over­drive just does­n’t cut it for me). I’ll update this lat­er with some infor­ma­tion on how the install goes.

Edit: here’s the post on the Log­itech soft­ware. It did­n’t go well.

I love the MX mouse. I’ve upgrad­ed along with many new releas­es they’ve put out. Beau­ti­ful hard­ware. Although I’ve always opt­ed for the non-blue­tooth one.

That said, I would­n’t put their dri­vers on my machine at all. They had an evil third par­ty Input­Man­ag­er at one point. Instead I use the stock prefs panel.

For what it’s worth, I’ve nev­er had the right click prob­lem that most peo­ple men­tion actu­al­ly caused by my hand posi­tion. Rather, it seems to be a dri­ver insta­bil­i­ty prob­lem of some kind. Much worse than hand posi­tion, real­ly, but per­haps there will be a fix one day

You’re right about the Tar­gus, its pro­file is very sim­i­lar to the Mighty Mouse, which is one rea­son I bought it, but you prob­a­bly won’t like it if you don’t like the MM pro­file. My prayers are with you for the instal­la­tion of the mouse software.

Scott: It still has an input man­ag­er as of 2.6. It just does­n’t break Growl, Text­Mate, and CrossOver any­more. (It may still break oth­er apps in dif­fer­ent ways, though—I don’t know, as I don’t use it.)

Does the Log­itech MX Rev­o­lu­tion use blue­tooth, or does it have a USB don­gle? It seems waste­ful to me to have a wire­less mouse that still uses a USB port. All you’re doing is giv­ing your­self the extra bur­den of hav­ing to charge it.

@Alan: it’s a small USB don­gle, nar­row in pro­file, and a bit over two quar­ters in length (or just short­er than the iPhone 3G is wide, if you pre­fer). I’ve got more USB ports than I know what to do with, so I don’t mind it too much.

I was set on find­ing a good Blue­tooth mouse, but those cri­te­ria seem to be mutu­al­ly exclusive.