Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

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I used one of those mice. It was horrid in almost every way. The worst part is that the click had such a low activation force that if you rested the weight of your palm on the mouse it would click, and the side grips were poorly placed. Classic Bay-area "you're holding it wrong" arrogance in design.

However, I have to say that despite that first extremely unpleasant experience with Apple peripherals I actually quite enjoy using my Magic Mouse, and the touch-sensitive surface is one of the more interesting innovations in a field that's largely been stagnant and where most "innovation" seems to be high-DPI lasers and RGB LEDs.

The ability to use touch gestures on the mouse itself (i.e. 3-finger swipe on the mouse's surface to switch workspaces, 2-finger swipes for browser back/fwd navigation, scrolling, etc.) is pretty awesome and not something I've seen anywhere else. I'd never depend on it for getting headshots in counterstrike but for desktop mousing it tracks okay and the battery is quite good.

There's an irony to Jobs being so adament that the right click button was wrong, when the minimalist Apple mouse ended up with dozens of unique gesture inputs that are far worse for discoverability.

Sometimes, the multi-touch swipe functionality can be quite annoying due to the sensitivity of the mouse. For example, I could be trying to swipe left to exit a webpage but instead it is controlling a slider somewhere on the page. When I am editing text, I can't save the document because the swipe gesture on the mouse is unintentionally controlling another active window. I can somewhat live with this, but its annoying.

As for Apple's standard keyboards for Desktop Mac or PCs, I hope you have a lamp somewhere as they still don't have any keyboard backlight functionality. Even some third-party USB-C wireless mechanical keyboards have this and are much cheaper than Apple's keyboards.

Given Apple's typical expensive pricing with their keyboards, and the lack of a keyboard backlight, you might as well say you're left in the dark.

>As for Apple's standard keyboards for Desktop Mac or PCs, I hope you have a lamp somewhere as they still don't have any keyboard backlight functionality. Even some third-party USB-C wireless mechanical keyboards have this and are much cheaper than Apple's keyboards.

I learned how to touch-type about 25 years ago. Backlit keyboards are superfluous if you know where the buttons are.

Magic mouse is a nightmare on any site with a map, always zooming in/out when I don't intend to. Sensitivity is way too high.

I don't like the multi-finger gestures on the magic mouse/ mac trackpad. I almost never have anything more than two fingers on the top of my mouse, and the effort of pulling the third finger up and adjusting my grip to do a gesture is not worth the time saved vs doing whatever action by moving the mouse around. My favourite, though, is the MX Master - the "gesture" button that you can hold and move the mouse to do gestures is extremely easy to use. does not require any additional hand movement, and can be mapped to anything you please. The gesture button has turned me from preferring the keyboard to just one handing with the mouse when I don't need to type. That the Master mouse also has two additional buttons and a horizontal scroll wheel is just the cherry on top.

E: I realise I've been mixing up magic mouse gestures and trackpad gestures. The magic mouse doesn't need three finger gestures, but my point about having to change the grip etc. still stands, and I do prefer the logi's use of normal mouse movements for gestures.

Can you give me some examples of how you use the gestures in MX Master? I have been using one for users but the novelty of the gesture button wore off in a week. I love the mouse though, and would give the gesture button another try if I can figure out use cases for it.

Pressing the gesture button -> Mission Control/ Super key on GNOME

Gesture + Move Left/Right -> Switch between full screen apps on macOS / Unbound in GNOME

Gesture + Up/Down -> Switch Workspaces in GNOME / Unbound in macOS

I leave some of the slides unbound in some systems because the action doesn't suit the software, with sliding right/left not visually matching switching between workspaces in my GNOME setup, and sliding up/down not visually matching anything except Mission Control in macOS. I don't want the same gestures to be different things on different systems so I just leave them unbound.

That's generally all I need + the horizontal wheel to handle forward/back and scrolling. If there's some other use case you really like, you can set them to the ones I've unbound, or even the forward/back keys. If you're using linux, You can get logiops (https://github.com/PixlOne/logiops) and use it to map everything.

I couldn’t use a Magic Mouse to save my life: less than two minutes of use invariably results in severe pain in the tendons on the back of my hand. Add a couple of minutes and the pain becomes excruciating.

Had the Magic Mouse, it eats through batteries like mice eat through cheese and got a bit annoyed with it, changed for a cheapo Logitech or Dell mouse, used that for 5 years, then bought an entry level Steel Series gaming mouse which is better in almost every aspect. Then ditched the 2011 Mac @work for a Linux box.

When I was using the Magic Mouse regularly I bought a rechargeable battery replacement that charged via induction on a little pad that plugged into the computer via USB for power. It worked great. (That said I’m using a Corsair Scimitar now and running Linux on my Apple hardware.)

I can't decide my sentiment towards the Magic Mouse. With my last job I had one with a MacBook Pro, and while the system integration was really good, and the function of it was fairly good, the form wasn't.

It looks great on a desk, sure, but it's not that ergonomic, and having to flip it on its back to charge it (thus disabling it), is absolutely useless.

I use a Logitech MX Master 3 nowadays, and while not quite as ground breaking as the Magic Mouse, I'd say it's overall better. The shape of it is great for my (larger-than-average) hands, and the amount of buttons (and additional gestures via modifier button) makes up for the lack of touch surface. The absolute flagship feature though is the magshift mouse wheel, which allows for ratcheted scrolling on Windows, while also removing the ratchet mechanism when you're trying to rapidly flick through a file.

Totally agree with this. Beauty doesn't necessarily translate to easy of use and ergonomic. Specially for people who uses computer for hours, ergonomics is more important than how it feels/looks in short term.

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