Love one button, so simple.

Simplicity.

Also - it beats those 10 button bastards.

I actually don't mind which, whether it's a two clicker or a click and keyboard. the one thing I've never been able to control effectively is a track pad.

Track Pad = Tiny Wacom Tablet with a Pen the size of a full toilet roll.

I really like the one-button mouse, when I first got my Mac I used a logitech mouse but subsequently have gotten to love using my Mighty Mouse as a single-button mouse.

I quite enjoy my Mighty Mouse, but ive only been a switcher for about 10 months and id rather right click than click and hold.

mjankor, I believe you are right on the button (no pun intended) with the design aspect of the one button mouse.

I remember reading a couple of years back about how the Macs Gui was superior to anything else on offer because of better application of Fitts' law:
Within the same article I'm sure it mentions the fact that the one button mouse was used to force the developers to develop software that complied with Fitts' law (or some similar variation of it.

Well being a laptop user I prefer the one button mouse as I use my right thumb to press the button. I also use keyboard shortcuts alot.

Even when I hop on my sister's iMac I do not find the 1 button mouse annoying. Cannot say the same for my Dad's PC though, contextual menus are a must. Also mouse gestures in Opera are the only way to browse the web on a PC

I seem to recall reading somewhere that the only reason a two button mouse was used was because Apple had the patents on the 1 button mouse. And, as such, the contextual menu was created merely to give the second button a purpose. Naturally I have nothing to back this claim up.

Actually, while I've never thought about that way, that's a very good point. In a Window's environment, you need a multi-buttoned mouse! Whereas the Mac can carry on quite merrily with the single-button mouseand perhaps work just as efficiently.

Now I think about it, and since I do have a Mighty Mouse in multi-button mode, the only apps on my Mac in which I consistently use the right-click anyway are in MS apps ...

and i will second that motion. all in favour.........

sao

I think that the one button mouse is great. It is simple. it works, so why fix something that ain't broken?

I can't remember who said it, but there was one Apple guy who said "So it's extremely difficult to push the wrong button."

As for the concept, I can see where people are coming from, but I still prefer a 2 button mouse.. out of personal preference. Usually, I can't be bothered getting out a mouse while I'm on the go, so I've also become really used to control-clicking. But the idea that it forces developers to write better GUIs is a fantastic concept - much like how the original Mac had no arrow keys.

As much as I've been using multi-button mice since my first ADB Animas jobby in 1987, I still hold that the one button mouse is a good idea, especially when one takes it into consideration as part of the collective user-interface experience.

If one reads 'About Face' by Alan Cooper (considered the bible for computer interface design methodology) you will strike again and again the problems inherent in a multi-button design. Alan praised the elegance and simple fluidity of a single button mouse, and how it gave a small, quickly learned vocabulary that allowed a new user to become almost instantly familiar with the machine's interface. Apple stuck to their 1984 publication "Human Interface Guidelines" (which actually had more than a little bit of input from Xerox legend Alan Kay) for more than a decade, refusing to add a second button and contextual menuing claiming (correctly) that it over-complicated user interaction and "inspired confusion". Apple were determined to stick to their 'KISS' approach because they saw it as their edge over Windows, citing the many productivity comparisons between MacOS and Windows throughout the late 80's and the 90's. Macintosh was "the computer for the rest of us." Leave Windows to the geeks and the accountants, if you just wanted to Get Things Done, you bought a Mac. That was the mentality.

Apple's inclusion of 'control click' with Mac OS 8.0 was a grudging step, its primary reason for inclusion was as another lure for switchers used to contextual-clicking inside Windows, and thanks to Adobe, this trick worked, and worked well enough to survive -- control-click and inherent contextual support came very close to being removed with MacOS 8.1, if it weren't for Adobe Photoshop who used Apple's version of contextual menus to further homogenise Photoshop across the MacOS / Windows boundary.

Whilst it was possible to add a multi-button ADB mouse to a pre-8.0 Mac, not many people did so because there was no contextual support anyway, nor any standard mechanism for interpreting the second (and in some cases third) button. Animas and Kensington independly decided on the same approach of mapping the second and third buttons to the left and right arrow keys, something lifted from early Unix GUIs. of course, once more-than-one-button mice were available as an option, people started writing for it.

One of the earliest and most successful 'mouse extenders' was NowMenus, from Now Software (which was bought by Proteron and subsequently became ActionMenus). Thanks to Apple's INIT31 mechanism, and well documented traps and entry points for interface subroutines, it was a rather simple exercise to extend the MacOS interface in logical ways that increased versatility and provided extra functionality, whilst retaining the overal 'look and feel' of the MacOS interface. NowMenus was a powerhouse, and to this day there is still nothing like it on any platform. You could create new custom menus in the menubar. You could tear off menus and turn them into floating palettes. You could dynamically re-assign hotkeys to any menu item, in any application system-wide, in real-time. It increased the hierarchial menu structure to more than 5 levels deep (handy if you had an alias of your hard drive in the Apple Menu). You could dynamically re-order the Apple Menu, and add dividers and special folders. Best of all, if you had a multi button mouse you could assign functions to the extra buttons, and even call a particular menu (or the whole menubar as one single hierarchial menu) right at the mouse pointer.

This last feature I loved dearly, and still wish I could replicate it on OSX -- of all the features in pre-OSX MacOS, Apple or third party, NowMenus is what I miss the most. A middle-click would make a menu appear right where my pointer was that was the menubar -- no matter which app, all the menus (including any custom additional ones) would appear in a normal, top-down menu list. By using another extension called MenuShade, I could remove the fixed menu bar entirely, and reclaim desktop real estate. No more tracking to the top-left corner, just click and there was my menubar.

Back in my youth, when I worked at an Apple reseller as a tech looking after SEs and Macintosh IIx's with Two Page Displays attatched for pre-press, I turned on so many graphic designers to NowMenus -- having an A3 screen to work in was good, but having to track all the way back to the top left was arduous, and NowMenus solved that.

The presence of contextual menus in OSX is more a legacy of OSX's heritage in NeXTStep and BSD. Despite Steve still insisting on the one button mouse concept, the actual coders of the kernel & UI were used to right-clicking, so they wrote it in anyway. Steve grimaced, and agreed to look the other way as long as they made sure that everything they did with a right-click could still be accessed by a single button mouse.

There is one last virtue of the single-button-mouse graphic interface: it lends itself to touch screens perfectly. Whilst Apple themselves have not released a tablet Mac, they have experimented several times with the concept in the past. Because of the one-button methodology, everything that could be clicked on or dragged could be controlled by a single finger-tip, without any keyboard needing to be present. Tablet PCs running Windows are often cumbersome and confusing to use in this manner because of the strong reliance on contextual menus that Windows has -- tablet makers have to resort to placing 'right click' keys on the sides of the tablet. When Apple finally release their iPad, they won't need to include any work-arounds, because the OS is geared around a single 'button' anyway.

Long live the single button mouse!


Brains

Thanks Brains. I didn't think about how one button affects touch screens and tablet computers. That could provide a real edge in the next few years.

GimliNZ: Don't get me started on Fitt's law and how almost all OSs completely ignore the most important parts of the screen... the corners and sides.

On the matter of keyboards, I'd like to agree that the ADB Apple II keyboard was by far the best keyboard Apple have ever made. The only keyboard I've ever used which was better was a DiamondData one which for some reason had the nicest feel to it of any keyboard I've ever used.

The current keyboards I find get worse with recent use. They 'stick' so that after a good amount of typing I find I'm having to really bash the keys to get them to go down. It's hard to describe but I'll do my best. Imagine a pole that slides down another pole. Imagine that the poles are quite different in size so that if pressure is applied at an angle when pushing the pole down, the leeway actually causes it to resist as it's going down as opposed to when pressure is directly above the pole.

The keys basically slide down poles and because ones keystrokes are naturally not forcing the key down directly above the pole, this pressure causes significant resistance.

I used to think it was just a bad keyboard until I experienced it on all three of my Mac k/b, including a wireless version. It's simply bad, cheap design IMO.

Just for the record, I type at around 90wpm with zero errors and my mother has been a professional typist for thirty years. She can type 120+wpm with zero errors whilst transcribing. I learned from the best, so no, it's not my typing that's the problem

Seems like, that to make it in the outside world, you need to be able to use a two-buttoned mouse!

I have always been a one button user.. Even when using a multi-button mouse .. I still only use the one button. It was interesting to note an ancient professor.. trying to use my Mac.. and he worked it out in a second.. It seemed that Windows must have had only one button, once. As he quickly remembered how to scroll etc.. Maybe all scientists used to work on Mac's once.