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Comment by Androsynth | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain why the one button mouse is better than the 2 button mouse? One of my pet peeves with Mac is that my magic mouse takes 2 clicks and a mouse movement to open a new tab in my browser, as opposed to 1 click of the scroll wheel on a pc. (Plus I have to waste a mental thread wondering if its going to register it as a primary or secondary click.)

Usually when I find something on the mac annoying unusable, I blame it on Industrial Design. As in, 'boy the magic mouse really hurts my hand after a while and the secondary click is difficult to use, but it really looks great (the finger scroll is really why I use it fyi)' or 'boy my macbook cuts sharply into my wrists in a just-about-but-not-quite painful way, but damn that unibody is sleek'.

I always just assumed the 1 button mouse (specifically the magic mouse) came about because it just looks so good.

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You can configure a Magic Mouse to emulate middle buttons using MagicPrefs. It's a pretty useful add-on.

i will still take the tactile feedback of real buttons.

Cmd+Click. You can even do it one handed on a trackpad. BTW that's what I do on PCs too since the third button is so unreliable across both software and hardware.

Like many of those 20 year old interface assumptions, things like the 1 button mouse are more or less gone from Appleland. Although they really really want you to believe it's still there. Try two finger tapping on a pad, or on the magic mouse a right click is just like a right click on a regular mouse (if you turn on right clicks or secondary clicks or whatever in system prefs).

Apple does studies for these things. They studied multi-button mice and found it slowed people down. The reason is that they clicked on the wrong button some percentage of the time.

What throws people off is, when you make a mistake with a gui, you correct it and forget about it. You don't account for your time because your mind is focused on the task. But and independant observer, who observes you doing the same task in both situations will have a stopwatch and recognize objectively which takes longer.

In some cases-- such as people's preferences for keyboards over mousing-- they perceive that they are faster accomplishing tasks with the keyboard than the mouse. They think this because they press keys faster and the brain accounts for each key press as a bit of an accomplishment... but the stopwatch shows differently.

Its the same thing with the second button mouse.

Trackpads have changed the situation, as a more direct form of control, 2, 3 finger gestures take less cognition. And of course, millions of people prefer 2 button mice, and don't care if they lose a minute or two each day as a result.

So, while there is a reason for the choices Apple makes, those reasons can be less significant over time.

But my point was, there is always a reason, and you shouldn't try to cut new ground unless you understand the reason for the original method.

I agree that finger gestures make up for whatever I have lost from multiple buttons. But I still lose a lot of time every day trying to use the right-click on my mouse. Opening new tabs is a pain and opening new instances of an application is a pain when i go to right click the dock (yes i know you can cmd-click or cmd-N, but thats not always an option).

edit: one last point before this thread ends, trackpads are awesome, computer interaction without one has become much more difficult for me. However they are much too modal, it's fine to make them simple for beginning users who misclick a bunch, but throw a bone to the experienced users who want some power in their interface.

On my Windows laptop, I have configured 1+1 click to act as middle click. It is quite convenient as I move around pointer by touching on finger, and when I want to open the link, I just tap another one, making workflow quite pleasing.

Perhaps you can set the same gesture on Mac ?

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