Magically mousey and scrollingly slow
Oct 20, 2009 Geek, In The News
Among the many new products Apple announced today was a new mouse design. Magic Mouse replaces the former Mighty Mouse product, and is the world’s first multi-touch mouse.
This mouse looks really cool, and I’m looking forward to trying one out when it appears in Apple Stores (the press release announcing Magic Mouse says it will be available at “the end of October”). The scrolling functions look like quite the improvement over the Logitech V270 Bluetooth mouse I have a mild gripe with now. More on that in a minute, though; first, I did notice a possible problem with using it in my setup.
Coincidental with the announcement of the new mouse, a new tech support article was published on Apple’s support site indicating that the scrolling and two-finger swipe controls were not available in Boot Camp (even in version 3.0, the version that just came with Snow Leopard last month). I can deal with not having the swipe, but I use the scrolling controls quite a bit, especially in games. I can imagine it being a problem on games, though, as MouseWheelUp and MouseWheelDown are essentially button presses to which games can map controls, and they would be difficult to map to a fluid scroll motion. Â With any luck, they may release drivers for it in Boot Camp at some future date.
My Logitech mouse, understandably, works great in Windows on Boot Camp (as it did on my previous Windows laptop). The mouse wheel scrolling behaves a little weirdly in Snow Leopard (and presumably in previous versions of Mac OS X, too; I just haven’t had a chance to try it out yet); since the mouse wheel is the version that “clicks,” instead of a smoother-scrolling wheel like many newer mice or the Mighty Mouse’s scroll ball. I’m used to my wheel scrolling the exact same distance with each click no matter how fast I scroll it, whereas in OS X the slower I scroll the wheel, the shorter the scroll distance. At it’s slowest, one click of the wheel scrolls a whopping total of one pixel line, which is next to useless.
From all this, I’m left with a few choices:
- get the Magic Mouse when it becomes available,
- get the Magic Mouse, but hang on to the Logitech mouse for Windows gaming use,
- continue searching for a way to make the mouse scrolling on the Logitech mouse work in Mac OS X the way I’m used to in Windows, or
- go with an altogether different (and presumably more cross-compatible) Bluetooth mouse (Bluetooth is important; I don’t want to tie up a USB port either with a wired mouse or with a wireless transceiver for a different type of wireless mouse).
I’m probably not doing anything anytime soon, but I’m interested in your feedback: which of these do you think is the best way to proceed? Plus, if you’ve got any ideas on the Logitech mouse wheel scroll speed in OS X, let me know that too. Comments are open below!
