the Magic Mouse is a much more capable mouse than Apple wants (at the moment)

I’ve been using the new Apple mouse, the Magic Mouse, for several days now. And most of the impressions I have about it are positive : you get used to it right away, the hand position is comfortable in spite of being a very low mouse compared to the others, and scrolling through the pages or doing it while selecting text with just one finger is, colloquially speaking, a joy.

But we also have the lack of functions as a negative aspect. In fact, it only recognizes a couple of two-finger gestures, and we cannot make three- or four-finger gestures. Talking to a friend about it, we were struck by the possibility that Apple has added a multitouch sensor capable of recognising gestures from just one and two fingers , like the trakpad in the first polycarbonate MacBook.

the Magic Mouse is a much more capable mouse than Apple wants (at the moment)
the Magic Mouse is a much more capable mouse than Apple wants (at the moment)

Does Apple have a plan? Will it launch a 2G Magic Mouse with more gestures thanks to a more advanced sensor capable of recognizing 3- and 4-finger gestures, leaving today’s mouse buyers in the lurch? Today TechCrunch gave us the answer . Let’s see it after the jump.

It turns out Apple hasn’t been as Machavelian as we thought. Thanks to an application called FingerMgmt that is capable of visually displaying the behavior of a multitouch sensor, it has been discovered that the Magic Mouse is perfectly capable of detecting three, four and even five fingers on its surface ; as you can see in the video that precedes these lines.

This gives me more hope than I originally had in the Apple multi-touch mouse, since knowing that it is capable of recognizing many more gestures than the company officially demonstrates, sooner or later we will receive an update with more mouse gestures (and if Apple doesn’t do it, I wouldn’t be surprised if other people do it unofficially).

In fact, some add-ons like MouseZoom are becoming almost indispensable with MagicMouse, since the speed of its cursor acceleration is too low for most users. And so that you don’t want to fill up your system preferences panel excessively, we also have the option that Darescu brought to us on his Twitter of accelerating our cursor with this terminal command:

defaults write -globalDomain com.apple.mouse.scaling -float N.0

Where N is an integer that controls the speed of the cursor.

Another unofficial and tremendously useful feature: MiddleClick. Pumpkin has warned us this morning about this little utility on its Twitter, in a startup designed to activate the central mouse click (which is normally done by pressing CMD and left click) and which also works with the Magic Mouse. We also now have BetterTouchTool, a utility that allows you to extend the functionalities of the trackpad and Magic Mouse in a similar way.

TechCrunch, Twitter de Darescu, Twitter de Pumpkin

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