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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Mighty Mouse on the PC

A few readers asked me whether Mighty Mouse worked on the PC. In fact, it does, and it even works better (or, at least more closely to the way I'd like it to work) on the PC than it does in Mac OS X, which is disconcerting. When you plug in the mouse, XP recognizes it as "USB Human Interface Device" and then announces that the new hardware is ready to use. Without loading any additional drivers, the primary and secondary buttons work properly (that is, the right button actually triggers pop-up menus), as does the scroll wheel. Most interestingly, Button 4 (which are the two side buttons, which still must be squeezed simultaneously) actually triggers a Back command in Web browsers, which is great.

The mouse is still too small for me to use regularly on the PC, but this is good news. I now wonder if I had just plugged it into OS X without first loading the drivers whether the right-click stuff would have worked. In other words: Does Apple's Mighty Mouse-specific driver install actually disable right-clicking by default?

Update: I've been told that the right-click and scroll functions of the Mighty Mouse do work if you just plug the mouse into an OS X system. However, the side button(s) do not. Thanks, Aziez.

[ Posted at 9:06 AM | Permalink ]