kaleberg's Profile

Scott is right. Shipping with a multi-button mouse will tell designers flat out that it is OK to design for a multi-button mouse. That means more complex application interface design. I have NOTHING against multiple button mice. However, I remember the days of the the industry standard three button mouse and saw how that led to amazingly complicated interfaces. We really do NOT want to go back there. Besides, who says that the mouse is the ultimate interaction device? What happens when we all move to on screen pressure pens?

There are a number of reasons that Apple specifies a single button mouse: - It means that applications should be designed to work with any single press pointing device, whether it is a mouse, a footpad or an eye tracker. While the mouse and trackpad are the current industry standard, Mac applications can work with other devices. - It eliminates button creep. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the THREE button mouse was the industry standard. Apple went for the the one button mouse while Microsoft went for a two button version. Once you argue for more buttons, you find yourself drifting towards the old TX-1 where you pointed with the light pen and threw some combinaton of the 64 console switches. Look at Adobe applications. They are popular among professionals and power users. They work with mice, trackpads, tablets, pressure pens and so on. Adobe lets you modify the meaning of a mouse action using the command, shift, control, option and space keys. That's right. Pressing the space key means drag-to-scroll, command-space means zoom in, command-option-space means zoom out. I am not making this up. Novices using Adobe Elements often collapse in shock when they discover this. The optimal Adobe mouse would have at least five buttons, and they'd have to work with button chording so you can do command-option-space drags. I doubt that Adobe is alone with this modification mechanism, though they likely have the largest user group that would scream blue murder if you proposed removing any of these features. - The Apple compromise was to say that any application should be usable with a single button mouse. Zero was too few. For added convenience, use keyboard modifiers, pressure sensitivity or extra mouse buttons as they are available. Apple does nothing to PREVENT the use of additional mouse buttons. They merely request that designers not require them.