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Comment by buster | Hacker News Reader

Scroll down to the mouse gestures and the first thing you see is someone slowly demonstrating the unbelievable feature of a right click on a mouse. With the index finger. Awesome.

Edit: There it is: https://www.apple.com/media/us/accessories/2015/e137bcd8-687...

I could watch this masterpiece all day.

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I got a Magic Mouse with my last Mac, with the one-piece top shell that rocks left and right depending if you want to left or right click. The very first game I tried with it was Borderlands, but you need to hold down the right-click button to aim and while doing so left-click to shoot. No can do.

I love Macs and really appreciate the attention to detail Apple put into all their products. Except mice. I'd take the cheapest mouse off Amazon over any of the ones from Apple any day of the week.

The Magic mouse surface doesn't "rock left and right". The whole piece clicks, regardless of where you press. What differs is that it is a multi-touch surface and identifies where your finger is at the time you click (or even tap, if you have that enabled).

There is a built-in option in OSX to enable "Secondary click" (aka Right Click, but it can also be swapped to be triggered by a left-side click for Left-Handed users) on a Magic Mouse.

If a piece of third-party software somehow doesn't work with the standard OS pointer system, it sounds like you should be asking them why their software is so terrible.

That's unfair on third party software. Pressing both mouse buttons is common in many situations, and is just something that the magic mouse does not make easy to support (speaking as a long-time magic mouse user btw)

The hardware is actually capable of this. The surface of the mouse is fully multi-touch, it can distinguish 3-4 independent touches, so it could easily support left + right clicks at once. However, that 'gesture' is not one offered by the software.

BTW, a great program to visualize the touch capabilities of the mouse is downloadable here: http://www.makeitgo.ws/articles/fingermgmt/

And the answer is going to be, "Because it's a port from Windows, and the Mac's small user base doesn't justify the effort needed to redo the control scheme." Regardless of whether you find that answer to be acceptable, that's what it will be, and the alternative is not to have it available on the Mac at all.

Not even the Mac's small user base. Out of the number of Mac users, take the very small fraction that play first person shooters, and then take the very very small fraction of those that do it with Apple's mice.

99% of that market is going to have something from Razer, Logitech, Corsair, etc. The other five people can bind zoom to their keyboard.

>If a piece of third-party software somehow doesn't work with the standard OS pointer system...

The previous white plastic Magic Mouse did allow simultaneous left and right clicks, the limitation is specific to this generation of the design, so that argument really isn't going t get you anywhere.

It's definitely the mouse implementation. The detection mechanics aren't compatible with most of the "gestures" them that gamers require. It is indeed better to avoid Apple's mice and trackpads for gaming.

For what it's designed for it is a really good mouse. Scrolling, navigating OSX, nothing comes close.

It is however not a gaming mouse. I'd gladly trade you a $10 mouse for your Magic Mouse.

I don't understand how people on a site called HackerNews still somehow aren't aware of what features apple products have, while still feeling obligated to post comments based on their own assumed/misinformed views about the features they believe aren't there.

Every mouse Apple have shipped for the last decade has supported "Secondary Click", and honestly after using a multitouch mouse for about the last 4 years, I don't understand how anyone would use anything else.

I've got one of those button-less trackpads on my work Mac laptop. I can't fucking stand it. The clicking just kinda gradually stops working about halfway up, like the bottom half is clickable and then it slowly fades to a non-clickable surface as you move up. So you have to keep track of where your finger is to know if you can click.

Click-and-drag when you realise you've run out of trackpad space to keep dragging is a mind-bending experience.

What's fucking wrong with buttons?

The trackpads on Apple laptops prior to the new force touch models are physically clickable only at the bottom because the top edge is basically fixed in place (as the hinge for the whole thing). I don't see how this is any worse than separate buttons - you'd still have the same physically clickable area then (the bottom bit) but you'd have less space to drag the cursor around.

Seriously though, turn on tap-to-click. Never worry about physically clicking it again.

> What's fucking wrong with buttons?

A multi-touch surface such as the MagicMouse or Trackpad on a recent Apple laptop is so ridiculously more customisable than a mere one or two or even three physical buttons + regular trackpad.

Taps, with 1-4 fingers. Swipes in 4 directions with 1-4 fingers. Swipe from the sides. Pinch/Spread with 2 fingers. Pinch/Spread with thumb and several fingers. Rotate.

Seriously, this is just what's available out of the box with OS X, before you look at third-party software to track even more gestures on touch (trackpad/mouse) surfaces.

Edit: clarified that pre-force-touch trackpads are top-hinged.

> I don't see how this is any worse than separate buttons - you'd still have the same physically clickable area then (the bottom bit) but you'd have less space to drag the cursor around.

Sure, but with physical buttons I know if I'm on a physical button. With this thing, sometimes clicking just doesn't work because I'm too far up and I have to move my finger down to where it's magically clickable again.

> Seriously, this is just what's available out of the box with OS X

I dunno, I don't use any of that stuff. I do 90% of my work from the Terminal. I drag windows, scroll, and select text (ugh) and that's about it. For my use case, this thing is no improvement over buttons and often a detriment.

> I drag windows, scroll, and select text

All of which is easier because of multitouch.

Two-finger drag to scroll. Three-finger drag to do anything that's normally click+drag.

Doesn't matter where your fingers are on the trackpad, or which direction you need to move, and you can briefly lift your fingers and resume a 3-finger drag.

Unfortunately Apple makes it near impossible to get a middle mouse button effect.

It's absolutely essential to copy-and-paste or to open new tabs. And X has had it right for thirty years. Still Apple can't manage to get a middle button click working.

Otherwise the Magic Trackpad is excellent.

Again, the benefits of multi-touch (as opposed to reliance on physical buttons) provides an option. Software like BetterTouchTool (or similar, I've not looked for alternatives for a while) can detect a tap in the middle section of a Magic Mouse (and likely a Trackpad too) and map it to whatever you want.

The new trackpads don't click at all, they "click" is an actuator underneath striking up at your finger when you press down.

How are you even using the thing? If you had a trackpad with buttons at the bottom, you'd keep your thumb on the bottom and click with it, while using your index finger to point. Just do the same thing! Are you trying to click with your index finger?!

The new Apple Trackpad allows clicking on the entire surface.

And it's not really clicking so much as pressing until you receive haptic feedback which feels like the surface "clicked".

- the new 'force touch' trackpads do not move, clicks are the same all over

- you can do click and drag with 2 fingers, don't have to slide the clicking finger

My former roommate has owned a Mac for at least 8 years before I lived with her. She had a Magic Mouse and literally did not know that a right-click existed...it was quite revelatory to her when I was helping her with spreadsheets (it's amazing how pop-up context menus can suddenly open up features that are, technically, already exposed via menubar, albeit buried).

I don't think she's ever used a PC though. And come to think of it, if I had never used a PC, I'm not sure why I would've guessed that there's such a thing as a right click on a Magic Mouse...especially if I grew up in today's iOS world.

I'm on a Macbook now. The trackpad is great. But when I use an external mouse, I use a standard mouse with physical buttons. The Magic Mouse -- like all magic bits of technology -- can misinterpret what I intend to do...the explicitness of the physical right mouse button is just more precise for me.

Apple hides far too many user features e.g. click the top on iOS to scroll back to top.

They may produce beautiful looking things (current iPod Nano excepted) but I think their reputation for usability is over rated (crazy key combinations on laptop keyboard)

It's mildly amusing if you have experienced the intensity with which Apple and their fans have defended the single-click only design over the years.

The first video about a new generation of apple mice is showcasing a simple right click as Joe User has known it for what.. 20 years? 40?

I acknowledge this masterpiece and say kudos to Apple for pulling that off. Sure, the mouse has other features. But the first one to show? The right click.

Can i left click? I don't know. It's not shown in the videos.

P.S.: I didn't mention multi touch on a mouse at all. Why do you assume i don't like it?

The marketing material is exactly that - it's their job to sell the product, and clearly a large part of the non-tech industry still have some weird notion about Macs not supporting secondary click.

My comment was about people on an explicitly technical news site having the same misconceptions.

> I didn't mention multi touch on a mouse at all. Why do you assume i don't like it?

Your general tone seemed to take the oh-so-common notion that Apple's products are never innovative and often "behind the times". My point was that Apple has been very innovative in terms of things like mice/trackpads.

As a 10 year old windows kid I was so turned off by having to use Macs in school because they lacked a right click feature.

I wonder how many windows users this cost them.

All the Windows users who aren't capable of comprehending or understanding how the stuff they are using works.

I remember visiting the brother of my friend quite a few years ago, he had a big iMac in his living room and asked me to put on some music. So I hopped over and was dumbfounded on how to right click. So I asked my friend and he basically said 'there is no right click' (note, both of them were mac users, I wasn't), and then I said surely there must be a right click!? Then he asked his brother and he was like 'don't really know, there's a key combination or something you can press I think'.

Anyway I put on the music and thought for years macs had no right click and never bothered to investigate further. I never had Apple money as a teenager and never used Macs, and given both of them had for years I thought they must've known. I'd been in the back of my mind ever since, hesistant to even consider switching to OS X. Until my early 20s when I needed a mac for work, looked into it and right clicked on my mac ever since.

I wouldn't dare put a number on the amount of users they missed out on, but I'd likely have switched a few years earlier. That, the price positioning and the minor hassle around office as a student were the three biggest things preventing it. The first ended up being totally false, the other two became less important as I stopped being a student and started a career.

As a Windows user for 10+ years before going to Mac, I had always heard people make fun of Mac for having no right click, and thought it was possible. But then I used a Mac and instinctively right clicked because that's what I was used to. Low and behold, right click worked.

If you don't investigate yourself, that's your problem.

Do you think people did not buy Macs because they thought it had no right-click capabilities?

You didn't like side-swiping or multi-touch tapping on a mouse with no buttons?

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