Okay You Big Babies, pay attention
Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 07:47PM 
Waaaaah! Apple makes a stupid mouse! Waaaah! It never works! Waaaah! There's too many buttons! Waaaaa! Okay children, listen up. When I was growing up on computers, they had a bunch of silly mice. Some had one button, some had three, most were nicotine yellow, but all had trackballs in the bottom. Guess what? We had to clean those trackballs or our mice wouldn't work. If you think that's too hard, stop reading, go spend $20 on a new mouse and shut up. For the rest of you too cheap or lazy to buy a superior mouse, I'm going to show you why my Mighty Mouse doesn't suck that bad.
Ergonomic it ain't: If you survived the puck mouse apple rolled out in the nineties, you remember how bad it actually could be. Apple fixed the shape... kinda. Now it gives you Carpal Tunnel Syndrome much slower. In the year 2005 A.D., 75 years after everybody else in the known universe had adopted (at least) two buttons and a scroll wheel, Apple made a huge leap from 1 button to 4 with a SCROLL BALL! The scroll ball we'll get to later.
The biggest problem is where the extra buttons ended up. Button 3 is the Scroll ball, activated by clicking down. Button 4 is the most annoying button and is placed right where you grip the mouse. Despite what some of you whiners say, this is a super sensitive button that inadvertently opens Dashboard (or whatever you set it to) every time you grip the mouse for precision work. I got fed up after a few times of losing a long lasso session in Photoshop, only to be replaced with the weather widget. Buttons 1 and 2 are like any other mouse—right and left. These are pretty much all I need. If you need more buttons... then Jog on, this is not for you.
Turn it off: Go to your System Preferences and turn the side and top buttons off. They are excessively stupid and you don't need them. The only buttons remaining are left click, right click and the trackball.
These are good.
Clean your cheese out: Officially Apple says just turn the mouse upside down and wipe it with a damp cloth. Yes, this is a very good thing to do, but unless you actually work in an Apple store, your less than minimalist workspace will require more. In fact, when I was a freelancer, I had been sat at desks where I've had to clean up sticky keys and clogged mice before I could even begin getting any work done.
The technique I developed as a Tech-Hobo involves one basic item: The Post-it Note. Take a post-it fold it in half, then tear it on the fold. Take that half, fold again and curve it into a "U" shape. Jam that sucker into the trackball as deep as you can then run it around in a circle.
That should unclog most of you. If not, use Apple's upside-wipey-thingy, and then repeat the post-it cram again. This has never let me down and my mouse works just fine. I do this about once a month or if I feel something sticking.
So there you go - if you're stuck with a Mighty Mouse at work, you can deal. Why not clean your keyboard while you are at it? That'll kill an hour.
Reader Comments (2)
Good tip. May have to find my Mighty Mouse and give it a try and rediscover sideways scrolling, If only you could make being a Tech Hobo a full time gig.
I did it for a year, it was pretty enjoyable... except sometimes you'd get sent to a place where they treated you like dog-doo on their shoe.