The first two mice on the block are the most boring: the Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer and the Logitech generic mouse I got as a kit with a wireless keyboard. Both are pretty basic mice, and so I’ll deal with them together in the same post.
Here they are, in all their pedestrian glory:
Yawn. Ok, the Logitech mouse has three buttons and a wheel of the “gear” variety (meaning is “clicks” as you roll it). It’s an optical wireless mouse, requiring two AA batteries. The receiver is one of the clunky half-moon-shaped ones. If you have used a mouse made in the last 3-4 years, not much more needs to be said. It moves the cursor, is instantly recognized by OS X, and…well, that’s about it. It should be noted though that it is noticeably heavier than a wired mouse, due to the extra bits needed for wireless, and the batteries.
The MS mouse has five buttons and a gear wheel (its two extra buttons are along the side). This is a wired mouse. And while it is also instantly recognized by OS X, the advantage to this mouse (and other MS mice I presume) is that, once you install the Intellipoint software for OS X, you get a new panel in System Preferences that lets you configure all aspects of the mouse. This includes per-application button key-binding and ballistic properties.
The former is very important for me because of the way I use PhotoMechanic: as I cull, I use the wheel to move between images, and the middle mouse button to tag the ones I want to keep (I “edit in”). To accomplish this, I use IntelliPoint to set the middle mouse button to “Control-T” for PhotoMechanic only. Very fast, one-handed culling that you can sit back in your chair to get through it.
As for the ballistic properties, one of the most irritating things after I switched to Mac was how the mouse moves in OS X. Happily, I can set the MS mouse to behave as a mouse does in Windows, which is a huge plus. I know it sounds trivial, but you converts know what I mean.
These are basic mice that do their job. Nothing special about either one, and both represent the most basic of mice in this roundup. I have been using variants of the MS mouse for the last 8 years or so.
So now that the baseline has been set, we can move on to the more advanced stuff. Stay tuned.
…Mike