> In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Steven Bennett > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes >> You know, it's amazing that people still have this silly impression that >> just because Apple only ships a mouse with one button, that the OS can only > > You learn something every day :-) I don't know that its a silly > impression - blame Apple's marketeers and Steve Jobs' reality distortion > field :-). I know some die hard Mac fans (one even owns a Lisa as well > as various Macs as part of his collection) and they haven't told me > this. Have all Macs been able to have multi-mouse buttons or only the > recent OS-X boxes?
Mac OS X supports the right mouse button and scroll wheel natively pretty much everywhere, and applications may make use of additional buttons, although Apple software itself didn't have any use for them until Mac OS X 10.3. The right mouse button, as with windows, brings up a contextual menu. Mac OS 9 had support for the right button to pop up the contextual menu. I *think* it supported right buttons natively on USB mice, but can't be sure - definitely if you had a driver to generate the right event from the device, it would work, though. Third party mouse drivers have had support for extra buttons on the Mac since the late 1980s. Mostly things like doing double clicks and click-locks, although they also allowed programming buttons to do all kinds of wild and crazy things. > Thats one of my two dislikes of Macs done away with. The other one is > the menuing system. Click and hold is bad for anyone with WRULD / RSI. > The Windows Click, release, mouse/key around as you please then click > when you are ready is good for RSI. Can you configure the Mac to have > menus that are good for you rather than bad for you? Again, an old issue, long since fixed in Mac OS X -- you can click and release on the menu bar and the menu will stay popped up until you select from it. (And you can click and drag as well... Or click and release then use arrow keys.) Older Mac systems had it too, called Sticky Menus (I forget if this appeared originally in Mac OS 8 or 9), and again, third parties have had this fixed for ages. >> Amigas -- 4000/2000/1000, 2 C-64s, a TI-99/4A, and a SWTPC 6800 that are all > > TI-99/4A, now that is going back a long way. 16 bit, but registers in > RAM, not on the CPU, weird beast. Never got to use one. Amiga - no > budget, I had to settle for an Atari ST :-) Bizzarely enough they are > still trying to resurrect Amiga (gets mentioned on Slashdot from time to > time). I know. Alas, too little and way too late... -->Steve Bennett To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
