I came away with one of Apple’s long rumored multi-button mice this holiday season, and I thought I’d toss out my thoughts on this so called “Mighty Mouse”.

Ergonomics
I’ve always found Apple’s standard one button mouse to be very comfortable. It’s no surprise then that the Mighty Mouse mirrors the feel shape of it’s single button counterpart exactly. The only differences are the scroll ball, and the two side tabs that function as a 4th button. The scroll ball takes a minute or two to get used to, but after a short period becomes second nature. Apple really nailed this feature in my view: not only does the vertical scrolling feel natural smooth, but the horizontal scrolling is a life saver in column-view and on large CSS and XHTML documents.

The squeeze button on the other hand, is still weirding me out a bit. My problem isn’t with the location per se, but more of the actual action of “squeezing” the mouse. It takes just a bit more effort than actually clicking a button, and that’s not something my hand is used to doing. Because of the unfamiliar feeling, it can initially be difficult to tell what exactly is the requisite amount of pressure to cause a click. Thankfully there’s subtle “click” sound given off by a speaker when the user squeeze clicks and uses the scroll ball: that helps immensely in getting used to the Mighty Mouse.

Software
Everything was great with Apple multi-button up until I tried to install the Mighty Mouse specific software. I popped in the CD, ran the installer, and was quickly told that the Mighty Mouse software was only compatible with OS 10.4: neither the wheel button nor the squeeze click would function in anything lower than Tiger. Because the Powerbook I use the mouse with is a work machine, I haven’t yet been able to upgrade to OS 10.4: multi-user licenses are not a cheap commodity.

Well shit.

Thankfully, 3rd party device driver software is a thriving industry for OSX, and I was able to find an acceptable replacement for the authentic Apple software in an application called Steermouse. After digging up Steermouse, I’m now able to customize both my wheel ball click, as well as my squeeze click as “hide application” and “application switcher” respectively.

Final Thoughts
For the most part, I’m enjoying Apple’s final stubborn admission that multi-button mice are not just useful, but essential in today’s computing world. Their approach to horizontal scrolling is far more refined than Microsoft’s hybrid scroll wheel / horizontal click scroll, and tying the application switcher to the squeeze click is brilliant. Unfortunately, my experience was dulled by Apple’s software restrictions, which ended up feeling like a slightly underhanded ultimatum to encourage users’ purchase of OS 10.4. At this point the best improvement to the Mighty Mouse I can think of would be making it wireless via bluetooth. This is probably inevitable, and once that baby hits the streets I’ll be the owner of two mighty mice.