I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Posted by Rod in Apple at 10:45 pm on Tuesday, 15 April 2008
I just remembered a great tip for working with an external mouse on a Mac. I had forgot to set it up when I changed machines.
I use a Microsoft Intellimouse with a Click Wheel. The Click Wheel is great for scrolling but you can also Click. I set it up to Expose that without reaching for the keyboard I can shrink all windows down and pick the window I want.
It took me a while to find where you set up the Click Wheel to launch Expose. It’s not under Mouse Settings but under Expose.
Under System Preferences> Expose & Spaces set ‘All windows’ to Mouse Button 3.
This will change your life.
Also don’t forget the two fingered right click.
blog
I prefer to set Expose to display when I mouse to the top corners of my 2 monitor desktop, thats easier than finding a bare spot of desktop wallpaper
For me, it’s simply squeezing the mouse from the sides (Mighty Mouse). No actual mouse movement required! I reserve clicking the scroll wheel for bringing up dashboard. It works well.
I have a Logitech MX Revolution mouse which along with a scroll wheel that can switch between standard click-step mode and free-spinning mode (great for scrolling long documents) comes with a proliferation of buttons.
The scroll wheel button switches between the two scroll modes, then below that is a “one-touch-search” button which I have reconfigured to toggle showing the desktop (handy when you need to access something you just downloaded). There is a rocker wheel in the recessed thumb groove which defaults to switching applications, though I have this configured to switching spaces when rocked and Expose all windows when pressed. Finally there are two buttons just above the thumb groove which default to back and forward actions. I have configured these to command-c and command-v which I set up when I was doing a project that involved a lot of repetitive copy-pasting, but you won’t believe just how useful that is in normal daily use until you’ve used it for a while. Seriously.
The only problem with using this uber-mouse is that you start to feel limited without it. Just the thought of a one-button Mac mouse makes me cringe :P
Been a long time since Apple offered a one-button mouse ; )
The best mac tip i ever got was to install quicksilver (http://quicksilver.en.softonic.com/mac)