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by Don Engstrom
First of all, I should reveal my bias.
I am a big fan of any mouse that has more than one button.
I received Kensington's 4 button ADB "Thinking
Mouse" as a christmas gift a few years back. Now
I can't imagine functioning without all of those programmable
buttons. XLR8 recently released a two button USB mouse
with a twist. Sandwiched between the two buttons is
a scroll knob which allows you to scroll through pages
without a trip to the scroll bar.
Installation: Since our trusty
9500 didn't have a USB port we had to install a PCI
card to add 2 USB ports. These can be had for roughly
$30-40 or you
can buy XLR8's "Performance Package" which
includes a USB card along with the mouse. Installing
the card is as easy as installing any other PCI card.
In other words, easy on some machines and hard on other's.
The 9500 is not the most friendly machine to crack open
but at this point I could practically do it with my
eyes closed. The installer places the necessary extensions
and a control panel required by the mouse.
Compared to Kensington's MouseWorks control panel, Interex's
control panel is definitely "no frills." The
4 options you see in the pulldown menu above are all you
get. Contrast that with Kensington's "MouseWorks"
which allows you to assign keystrokes, launch applications
or URL's, paste a block of text, and a whole lot more,
then Interex's control panel loses a little of its luster.
To be fair, MouseWorks is a highly refined product that
has gone through several revisions whereas the Interex
control panel software is in its first release. Hopefully
new features will be added in future releases. One addition
I would like to see is the ability to program a function
for pressing both buttons simultaneously, in essence adding
a virtual third button. In the mean time, I would stick
with the default settings of "Single Click"
for the left button and "Control Click" (which
gives you instant access to contextual menus) for the
right.
Scrolling: One area where the XLR8 mouse beats
Kensington's hands down is in the scrolling department.
Kensington allows you to assign scrolling to mouse buttons
but I never found this to be very useful. I also didn't
want to sacrifice 2 buttons to scrolling up and down.
The scroll knob on the Interex mouse works elegantly in
two different ways. Turning it up or down one click acts
as the same as one click on the scroll bar arrows. Press
down on the scroll knob while moving up or down and you
can scroll continuously at varying speeds. I quickly got
used to scrolling without heading over to the scroll bar
and found it especially handy when perusing web pages
and long readme files without interruption. I tested the
scroll button with several different applications and
it worked flawlessly with two exceptions. Acrobat pdf
viewed in Netscape (using the Acrobat plug-in) wouldn't
accept mouse scrolling although documents opened with
the Acrobat Reader application worked fine. Scrolling
in DreamWeaver 1.2, which is always slow, became unbearably
so when trying to use the scroll knob. Happily, these
are the exceptions rather than the norm.
Conclusions: If you are looking
for a replacement for the mouse that came with your
iMac or Yosemite machine you should be quite happy with
the USB Scrolling Mouse from XLR8. I quickly got used
to the convenience using the scroll knob. Although I
might take some heat for saying it, Apple is really
missing the boat when it comes to their input devices.
While 4 buttons might seem excessive to some, having
only one is barbaric and a real productivity bottleneck.
Pitting the 2 button XLR8 mouse against the 4 button
Kensington may not have been fair as they are two different
beasts. The Kensington mouse, when it was available,
also cost over twice as much as the XLR8 mouse. I hope
XLR8's development team will beef up the feature set
available via the control panel in future software releases.
In the mean time the Scrolling Mouse makes a respectable
alternative to Apple's one button goose egg.
Do you have a USB mouse that you think is the "bees
knees" or one that you think people should steer
clear of? Are you satisfied with Apple's one button offerings?
Swing by our Discussion
Board and share your thoughts....
Don
co-authors the MacSpeedZone
and MacReviewZone
sites.
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