devaler | # 11 | 2009-02-24, 03:52 | Report

+1 for the Invader Zim allusion.

sjgadsby | # 12 | 2009-02-24, 04:41 | Report

Or you can just Ctrl + click.



(Not that I like Ctrl clicking.)

timsamoff | # 13 | 2009-02-24, 05:09 | Report

Personally, I love my two-fingered right-click -- which I can do anywhere on the trackpad's surface (i.e., no button's needed).

-T.

Bundyo | # 14 | 2009-02-24, 05:19 | Report

I *bet* you can Ctrl+click on an iPhone too. Probably with the new external keyboard

Voltron | # 15 | 2009-02-24, 06:43 | Report

haha ctrl click is terrible. They should have implemented 2 button mice as a standard a LONG time ago

sjgadsby | # 16 | 2009-02-24, 12:46 | Report

Well, first off, Apple has an existing user base, part of which--believe it or not--hates mice with more than one button. Not throwing your existing users to the wolves as you strive to gain greater market share is a cause often championed, well, right here.

Second, Apple has had mice with right-click ability for years. There may not have been two, obvious buttons, but the shell rocked to left- and right-click. It was just the trackpads that, sadly, lacked the functionality for a while.

Finally, I can understand giving Apple grief over notebook trackpads that needed the assistance of a keyboard key to right-click, but USB mice for desktops? Sheesh. It's not as though the average (or even above average) PC comes with a mouse worth keeping. I'm happiest when I can drop the keyboard and mouse from a PC configuration, even if it only saves me five bucks. Any keyboard and mouse that comes with a PC is tossed, unopened, into the storage closet anyway.

tso | # 17 | 2009-02-24, 13:16 | Report

iirc, its not so much the shell that rocks, as its a sensor that detects if the finger is on the left of right side of the thing. so if you press with the right while the left finger is resting on the shell, it will see it as a left click...

bongo | # 18 | 2009-02-24, 13:26 | Report

I wonder why it's such a big thing to add a second mouse button or bt keyboard support. These things don't require much development work.

attila77 | # 19 | 2009-02-24, 14:19 | Report

It's conceptual, one of those things they feel they need to keep in order to be 'Apple' not just another niche PC manufacturer. And nobody is better in hyping their approach as superior (even when, often enough, it isn't) than Apple.

sjgadsby | # 20 | 2009-02-24, 14:26 | Report

Err, I don't think extra development work has anything to do with either. Mac OS has supported multi-button mice for at least twenty years, I'd guess, and many applications have had context menus that could be activated by right-clicking.* The support has been there, a user simply needed to plug in a multi-button ADB, or later USB, mouse.

On the hardware side, I believe Apple has mostly used Logitech guts for their pointing devices. I had a three button Logitech bus mouse for my 8088 IBM PC way back when, so if anything, I'd say Apple has been paying Logitech for the minor bit of work necessary to keep cranking out pointing devices with fewer buttons than their normal fare.

Also, as I pointed out above, Apple has been shipping mice with left- and right-click support for quite some time. They just went out of their way to design that support into a mouse that didn't look like it had multiple buttons. Though Apple certainly didn't invent the mouse, they led the change in bringing it to the masses, and at the start, they just wanted to make the newfangled pointing devices as simple as possible. Later, they kept catering to users, some of whom, yes, feel their OS is superior to other because it doesn't require right-clicking.

It's a design thing, not an engineering thing.

Is it silly? Maybe. Using it as a reason to feel superior certainly is, but then I've seen equally goofy "my OS is better than yours" arguments from users of plenty of other operating systems.

As for the no-Bluetooth-keyboards-for-the-iPhone issue, I can't imagine that's engineering either. I can see Apple so determined to make the phone simple and easy to use that they deliberately block the use of Bluetooth keyboards. After all, having reviews mention that to really use the phone for email or whatnot, power users should skip the on screen keyboard and instead buy and pair a whole 'nother device might have hurt the "It's simple!" image. No Bluetooth keyboard support leaves everyone to work with the on screen keyboard for a time, come to accept it, and declare it, "not too bad, really."

Ta-da! Ugh.


* Or Ctrl-clicking. Or click-and-holding. Or...

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Last edited by sjgadsby; 2009-02-24 at 14:53.