New Keyboard & Mouse

Since my honey knows I'll be buying a Mac mini in the near future and that computer doesn't come with a keyboard or mouse, she bought me a new wireless desktop set for my birthday!

It's the unimaginatively-named Kensington "Wireless Optical Desktop for Macintosh." Although I haven't had them for long, I'm thinking these are the best keyboard and mouse I've ever used.

The keyboard has a lot of extra buttons for multimedia and internet functions, including a scroll wheel! Considering that I've been using Apple's incredibly crappy first generation USB keyboard with its half-sized arrow keys and no delete key, this new keyboard is like being plucked out of Hell and sent to Heaven.

And then there's the mouse. First of all, it's optical and wireless. These two features alone are fantastic but what's really great is the software that comes with the mouse. The mouse has two buttons and a click-able scroll wheel, which are all fully programmable.

I read a comment on Slashdot once that went something like "It's not that the Mac has a one-button mouse, because it doesn't. The Mac has a five button mouse and four of the buttons are on the keyboard." This comment is quite accurate. Although you can operate a Mac using only the single button on the mouse, the MacOS has a lot of time-saving features which are available by holding down various keys while you click. These keys are: Ctrl (right-click equivalent), Option, Command, and Shift.

I've set up my mouse buttons to allow me to do all of those except Shift. Left and Right(Ctrl) click work as expected. Clicking the scroll wheel is Option-click. And if I click both the right and left buttons at the same time I get Command-click. This is going to allow me to have the most convenient Mac experience I've ever had.

2005-03-12 16:43 C&T