About Apple’s Magic Mouse

In short: wow!

I recognize my not really inventive attitude, but I think there is no better summarize about my feelings.

The Apple Magic Mouse

Look

Well, just by itself, the mouse is really beautiful. I admit it would not be worse with a soft white light coming from the Apple logo, or from the sides of the mouse, but I think it looks really nice on my black desk. Furthermore its bright tactile surface reflects as a mirror does which makes the mouse “pop”.

Feel

My dear old PC mouse

My dear old PC mouse

My Apple computer is a Macbook Pro (of de 5th family I think. It looks like theses ones and costs me 1200 €), so it has a built-in mutltitouch trackpad which works very well. However, I missed my dear old PC mouse. You know, there is something really different between a trackpad and a mouse : the depth. The Magic mouse is really nice from this point of view: it allies the power of the multitouch technology and, with its subtle curves, the presence of a classic computer mouse.

First approach

There is nothing easier than connecting this mouse with your OS X based computer. Just power on the mouse (with a little brushed button like the power on/off on iPod Nano). If Bluetooth is enabled on your computer, a window should pop up, print you some messages, and disappear. That’s it. The mouse is running on your Mac. It’s a bit strange at first, but I got used to its smooth surface blazingly fast.

Get ready to ride

Since the mouse is available to sale, you can read everywhere that you must use MagicPrefs. That’s why I downloaded it to custom my mouse gestures. This tool is really nice (I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t provide such a software with Snow Leopard). But it has one major drawback: it doesn’t support tab (⇥) composed keyboard shortcuts. I wanted to use them for my Firefox (with ⌃⇧⇥ and ⌃⇥ to switch between opened tabs). After digging, let’s say, 2″40 seconds with Google, I found BetterTouchTool, a software similar to MagicPrefs but which is far more flexible (and it works for touchpads too). So I dropped MagicPrefs and installed BTT. Well, I can say I’ve never felt so relaxed with a computer (except when I switch from PHP to Python, but…).

[BetterTouchTool screenshot]

BetterTouchTool

Conclusion

To put it in a nutshell, I highly recommend you this mouse. Unless you are a narrow-minded conservative fundamentalist of keyboard as the only real interface with a computer, the Magic Mouse is really pleasant and easy to use. A nice purchase in my humble opinion.

About Thomas Pelletier

17-year old student fond of math, science and IT. I like spending my spare time building websites with nice tools such as Django, Mercurial and Textmate. New technologies and web services are some of my passions. When I've something I'd like to talk about, I write a post and publish it on this website.
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