A lot of changes seem to be going on inside the headquarters of Apple Computer Inc. It looks like the madman who runs the company is finally caving in to pressure. First, Apple switches to Intel, and now Apple releases a multi-button mouse. The amazing thing is that it took 21 years to happen. That’s practically a millennium in computing terms.

Word has reached the campus of Apple from a dying man on horseback who told of strange and mysterious computers used in a foreign land that offered not one but several mouse buttons. Before the aged rider expired, he also told of a wheel on the mouse that spun, causing items on the screen to scroll.
(Excerpt from Macworld.com)

The odd/amazing thing about this mouse, however, is that it doesn’t actually have any buttons. In fact, you can’t even see two distinct left/right-click buttons. Mac OS X can be set to assume the Mighty Mouse as a one-button mouse and so, just like regular Apple mice, it does a left-click no matter where you press on the mouse. However, there’re touch sensors in the mouse and the right-click can be activated, to, well, right-click, if you happen to exert pressure on the right-hand side of the mouse. The scroll wheel is actually a scroll dot that doesn’t simply go up or down but, like a rotating sphere, it goes 360 degrees and so this is the first mouse I’ve seen that can scroll diagonally. Another weird thing about this mouse is that all the clicks are “synthesized”. The mouse never makes any physical clicking sound, but there’re tiny speakers in the mouse that give a synthetic clicking sound when you click, just like the Clicker on an iPod.

Enjoy the weather while it lasts!
–Karan