Of mouse drivers
I mentioned my PowerBook drive died, but I didn't mention a reader, who wishes to remain semi-anonymous (Thanks, Alex), sent me a new one. This is actually the second time a reader has kept my Macs up and running by sending hardware love, and its always appreciated.
After spending some quality time with Apple's swell instructions and my handy Torx-8 screwdriver, I used my shiny new drive as an excuse to reinstall OS X from scratch again, and this time start to trick it out. For my first two installs, as I said I wanted to make sure the problems I was having were repeatable on other systems first -- and I just didn't want to introduce the doubt by installing my two beloved haxies or even something as simple as a 3rd party mouse driver.
This hasn't been optimal, because I'm really, really partial to my buttons. I figured I'd start out slow with a driver that could handle my buttons, and then work my way back up to fink so I could polish off some things on my plate, but I haven't been able to get past the drivers...
I get that not everyone is in love with multiple buttons, but I am, because over the years they've become hardwired into how I work, and I just love my Intellimouse in a major way, and not having access to its full functionality hampers me.
I.E., in my mail applications, the thumb buttons are set for copy and paste, and the wheel button is set for paste-as-quotation. In my web browsers, the thumbs are set for forward and backward, while the wheel button is set to open a new click in a tab (I know, its already set for that, but more on that later). Similar things for text editors, etc.
Once I was used to it, it really made me more productive, but in order to get those buttons to do anything you have to install a driver.
Since I own an Intellimouse, it would make sense to use its drivers, which do let you set what the buttons do in each app, but there's a bit of a problem here:
- I had some real wonkiness with the driver starting back in 10.3.x.
- Microsoft hasn't updated their driver in -- quite literally -- a year. And, when they did not much changed.
Because mouse drivers like this have to work at a low level, they install things like kernel extensions, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself but is a bad thing when they are never updated to take care of issues. I went round and round with someone at the MacBU ages ago, where a manager finally broke down and said "I doubt we'll get that taken care of, but I'd suggest you try USB Overdrive. We basically just license that and spiffy it up for our products."
I can imagine they don't put a lot of resources towards the OS X Intellimouse drivers, considering its a small part of their business, and they got major points for being honest and pointing me in a direction that might help me, but it's just a little annoying to have to chunk down another $20 to be able to use the features of a product I bought.
In their competitor's defense, Kensington seems to update their drivers more regularly, but I don't like their mice at all, and while Logitech seems to keep up better and I do like some of their products, you can't set custom key bindings per application.
That $20 would have to go to USB Overdrive, which is sort of the monster 3rd party USB input driver for the Mac, covering everything from 2-button mice to steering wheels for racing games to joysticks for flight sims. It's pretty much the first product to turn to, but in 10.4 isn't giving me any love. I used the updated 10.3.9 version of it, which turned my cursor a little wonky in two ways...
- For some reason, it seems to think a standard click is actually a double-click, which gets maddening as when you're trying to select a background app it's annoying to have it go minimized, let alone when you have an email message selected and hit the delete key, and it deletes the one you have selected and the one right after it.
Because the above can be a little hard to grok, here's a movie example where I'd try to position the cursor in an email and it'd end up selecting the entire line:
I originally thought this was the left-button starting to lose it, which would be a big coincidence but I've heard of them prematurely going in later models, but after uninstalling it went away.
- Focus problems seemed to become more acute. I've seen this in plain old 10.4, where the mouse will seem to get confused about whether the cursor is interacting with a foreground or background app (It's one of the reasons I disabled Dashboard this go around), but it seemed to become much more common with USB Overdrive installed, although I don't know why it would.
I need to be careful about that last one, because I already saw this a little before installing USB Overdrive, and it just seemed to make it happen much more often, which could well be some kind of placebo effect.
Either way, I have to admit that USB Overdrive wigs me out a bit, just because the interface seems so 'fragile':
If you've never used it, lets just say I'm doing it justice by resizing it down. It feels like its straight out of Classic, which -- and this could again just be associations -- makes me wig out a bit when I know its being installed and operating at such a low level, but then again I totally wigged out that Stuffit 8 was installing a KEXT file and may be showing some form of bias and refuse to use it now, so I could well just be warped here.
I don't have a problem with the product, and have loved that it was around in the past -- even if I harbored some resentment towards the manufacturer for requiring me to use it -- and am sure if there is an issue with 10.4 it'll get ironed out eventually. All I know is that my mouse problems went away when I uninstalled it and rebooted, and that fiddling with the double-click speed in Apple's mouse panel had little effect. Which means I can't use it right now, and Microsoft's drivers are out.
I know, I know, yours is working fine and I just have weird problems, and I do almost feel bad about bringing it up because the software is what made my hardware usable for so long, but it's what I'm seeing.
I mentioned Apple included support for multi-button mice with OS X at a basic level; the right button works, and you can scroll if your mouse comes with a wheel, but past that it gets a little weird.
Their basic driver is, um, basic, and you can't do some things other platforms take for granted, like being able to swap the left and right buttons. There's no support for binding those buttons to anything else, let alone if your mouse comes with other buttons.Where it gets weird is that if you're in Safari and click the wheel-button, it'll open a link in another tab or window, depending on your settings, so it basically acts like an apple+click. Apple's driver does see those buttons just fine, as if you go to their Dashboard & Exposé preference pane, they show up...
Of course, this is basically Apple saying "It's fine if you want to use a multi-button mouse for the Mac, but please use them for this.", which can wear a little thin, because I'd like to use those buttons for other things and use the hot-corners for Exposé.
As Mac users, we have to recognize that as a minority platform, we're going to be buying a minority share of product from a company, which means we just get an employee working a day a week on drivers for our platform while they're helping compete in Windows-land the rest of the time. It sucks, and could always improve, but it doesn't seem to be getting any better at all, and probably won't for the significant future.
We've seen this before, with say, digital cameras and scanners. The hardware was all cross-platform, primarily USB and Firewire, but the manufacturers either wouldn't justify porting the drivers in a timely manner -- if at all -- or they were really quite sucky, and often they came late and still sucked, and getting them to keep up with Apple's OS updates is always a challenge. VueScan, a third-party scanner app, saved the day for most with scanners.
When it came to digital cameras, Apple decided it had to take matters into its own hands -- because its hard to be a digital hub when nothing you plug in works -- and rolled its own generic solution and whips out profiles to support specific models. You may lose a little in the model's custom features by using the Mac, but the basic stuff generally worked and the platform shined because of it. If you have iPhoto installed, your images may have wonky color, but plugging in a camera should Just Work™.
It's that way for multi-button mice too, provided you just want to use the buttons with Exposé or Dashboard.
I've been aching to see them step up on mice drivers -- something universal which would take the suckiness out of this situation -- and one of the things that made me tingle about Apple's Mighty Mouse is that it seems to come with drivers that support the buttons in a real way; namely, you can set the buttons to 'Exposé' or 'Dashboard', but you can also set them to 'other'. It doesn't support changing the bindings per app, but it looks to be a solid multi-button driver. For most of this, there isn't a whole lot of magic going on to pull off this functionality, but I worry that now that Apple has its competing hardware out there, they'll be less inclined to want everyone else's to Just Work™ as theirs does.
With Apple selling their own multi-button mouse now, which they undoubtedly want to become successful, Logitech and Microsoft and Kensington and others will undoubtedly lose some sales to the faithful alone. While the competition could theoretically spur them to create more competitive drivers, they're unlikely to do so, because the spoils of that competition just aren't that great in the grand scheme of things, compared to the work that coder could be doing elsewhere, so they'll probably be even less inclined to throw money at supporting software.
It's a vicious cycle that could only be solved by Apple shoring up the drivers across the board, by having a solid reference driver for multi-button mice, but with the Mighty Mouse they've just taken out any real financial incentive to do so, and my universal-multi-button-driver will be a pipe dream for a long while to come.
Posted by drunkenbatmanAugust 08, 2005, at 12:53 AM
Comments (21)
Posted by: vastheman at August 8, 2005 01:29 AM
USB overdrive makes more trouble than it's worth. If you look at the emulation bulletin boards on the 'net, you'll find a lot of joystick and trackball problems are solved by removing USB Overdrive.
Posted by: Swedelmin at August 8, 2005 01:37 AM
I share your dream drunk, but wonder how compatible USB devices will stay. I bought a new Logitech gaming mouse and returned it because my Mac would not boot with it plugged in. If it was built with standards, that shouldn't happen should it?
Posted by: vastheman at August 8, 2005 02:03 AM
I just found out that a cheapo-brand USB 2.0 hub will crash my PowerBook every time I connect it. The machine won't boot with it plugged in, either. Funny thing is, it works on a B/W G3 running 9.2.
Posted by: Abhi Beckert at August 8, 2005 02:43 AM
Have you had better luck with tiger now?
Posted by: Mike at August 8, 2005 03:03 AM
I've gone through two Intellimouses (the second was an Explorer) and used USB Overdrive with both of them...I always chalked up that problem with the mouse double-clicking sometimes, while other times just single-clicking, to the mouse itself since it didn't happen immediately, it just cropped up after a while.
Instead of buying a third Intellimouse, I just bought a Kensington PilotMouse Optical Pro (5 button) and have been happy with that. My roommate bought one, so I got to try it out first. It seems to fill more of my hand, I get cramps in the hand less often, and there's grips on the side too, so it's more comfortable. It works fine with USB Overdrive, no issues with it clicking erratically like the Microsoft mouse did. :)
Posted by: drunkenbatman at August 8, 2005 03:11 AM
Have you had better luck with tiger now?
As in, are the bugs gone? Nope, for those types of bugs, it won't work that way. :/
Posted by: John Evans at August 8, 2005 04:25 AM
When putting quicktime onto a page generally autoplay = false is a good param to use... Not a biggie, but annoying that movies when I get to them tend to show the last frame and need rewinding :)
Posted by: Skatch at August 8, 2005 04:31 AM
Very timely post for me. I just bought an MS Trackball Explorer and spent part of the weekend playing around with the different driver options - Apple's, Microsoft's, and USB Overdrive. Very interesting that MS licences USB overdrive. You'd think they could at least enable the full functionality of it in their licensed version. But it can't do nearly as much.
I had the same issues as you do with USB Overdrive. Paying an extra $20 is something I'm not willing to do at the moment. And I didn't like the 'classic'-ness of the app. (Click the 'about' button. The info box is straight out of classic-land.) Had the same uneasy feeling about letting it install a kext when it appears to be so old.
So I decided to just use the plain OS X drivers and live with limited functionality. It's useful to have exposé available at the click of a button, but obviously a shame I can't customise the buttons per-app to get more functionality. I'll join you in waiting for Apple to write a better universal driver, or for an open-source one to appear.
Something odd I noticed: your exposé control panel lists mouse buttons 3 through 5. Mine goes all the way up to 6. Not sure why.
Posted by: BLEEP at August 8, 2005 05:23 AM
I know, I know, yours is working fine and I just have weird problems
Just as you say. :-)
Posted by: Twist at August 8, 2005 07:49 AM
"...Kensington seems to update their drivers more regularly, but I don't like their mice at all..."
I love my Kensington Optical Elite but their drivers didn't work for crap. There was actually a delay registering mouse clicks when I was using it. The delay was barely noticeable when I had plenty of free CPU but nearly the second I launched Photoshop the delay would become 2 to 3 seconds long which made working in Photoshop a real pain. I filed bug reports and waiting and two versions later they still hadn't fixed the problem so I switched back to USB Overdrive which I used to use with a generic USB mouse under Mac OS 9.
As for USB Overdrive looking like something from Classic the interface is almost exactly the same as the old OS 9 versions. It could use an update. And they way it installs a PrefPane that just launches the external application is very annoying.
Posted by: Carson Christian at August 8, 2005 08:26 AM
Logitech MX 1000... It's the only way to fly. I have to say I'm (rediculously) biased since I have been a mac user for about a... month? Something like that. And the MX came over with me from the PC world. Logitech's drivers seem to play nice with tiger and the tracking/responsiveness is everything I came to expect over in the windows camp.
As a side note, I have been reading your blog since a month or so before the switch. Interestingly, it seems your posts took a serious turn towards the dark and brooding (about the OS and quality control in general) right after I made my purchase. I still have that warm fuzzy feeling from finally owning the machine/platform I have wanted for years, but I can say I may still be sitting on the fence had I read your more recent posts before swiping my credit card. Tiger works swimmingly for me for the most part, but as a newer user I have to put that into perspective by saying I'm likely not as deep into the OS as yourself or most of your readers. The only real compaint that I have so far is that some of the structure seems downright counterintuitive. I can't tell for sure if it's because I'm windows trained or if there is actually something wrong here, but that's my vibe. The biggest one would have to be access to applications. I can't beleive that I have to click my mouse SIX TIMES just to get to and open an app in the top level of the Applications folder.
So this is my "First Post" of sorts, and I'd like to thank you for your time and effort for the community. Just take another sip and a deep breath, and don't loose hope. We're all counting on you to keep your chin up, and we're all doing the same.
Posted by: Theodore Lee at August 8, 2005 09:03 AM
Good news. If you have Mighty Mouse's driver installed, it seems to work with other mice. I have the Kensington Optical Elite at work, and after installing the Mighty Mouse driver over the weekend, I get the same functionality out of the Kensington mouse. The scroll button activates Dashboard, and the 3rd and 4th buttons pressed simulatenously (the "squeeze) activate Exposé...just as I had it configured for the Mighty Mouse.
However, if I open the mouse pref pane and try to change the settings with the Kensington mouse attached, I don't get all the options, just the standard mouse settings.
So it would seem Apple has taken the next step to shore up the mouse drivers under OS X with Mighty Mouse. I'm not sure if this will work with other mice like the Intellimouse. I have one at home I'll try later today and get back with you on it.
Apple will surely include the MM driver in 10.5 by default, and at that point, the added benefits of this driver might be expanded to other third party mice. Of course, Apple could lock out other mice from benefitting from this driver. With Apple, you never really know how they will react.
Posted by: Aesop at August 8, 2005 09:03 AM
Whooo. So this is what happens when one tries to get something that does more than just point and click. That's a shame.
I feel like there's been a bit of a delay in coming up with any improvements in physical interfaces. When I say "a bit of a delay" I mean that I feel we're about 20 years off where we should be. Where are all the exotic solutions?
Speaking of which, where are all the exotic solutions?
Posted by: Jussi at August 8, 2005 09:18 AM
Their basic driver is, um, basic, and you can't do some things other platforms take for granted, like being able to swap the left and right buttons.
I'm probably missing something major, but for me and my logitech trackball that seems to be possible with Apple's basic drivers. System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Mouse -> Primary Mouse Button is the place to check.
Posted by: djbsquared at August 8, 2005 10:21 AM
so its only a matter of time until someone hacks the Mighty Mouse driver to be a universal driver, right? :\
Posted by: Peter da Silva at August 8, 2005 01:17 PM
Apple really needs to rationalise all their input management. I must have ten different applications and preference panes and menu extras all hooking in to the input chain and independently and invisibly snarfing their own hotkeys out of it.This is just nuts. There should be one "Input manager" preference pane and a standard panel or dialog, and a call that an application can make to ask for a key/corner/keyboard control/mouse button or ask the user to set it... then ONE component in the input chain should be responsible for handling it all.
The preference pane should let me configure ANY key, corner, mouse button, foot pedal, or third-party plug-in (so that Griffin can hook the Powermate into this), assign it to any registered control in any app, and ideally hook it into osascript so I can do something like...
set mytrigger to get hmi control "Myscript : Next"And then I can add a key in the preference pane to trigger application "Myscript" function "Next"....
on hmi control mytrigger
tell application "iTunes"
next
end tell
end on
(while I'm thinking about this, how about adding Javascript OSA into Dashboard (but not in general webkit, of course), so we can do osascripting with something better than Structured COBOL?)
And make it something that Cocoa apps can use without having to wedge a bit of Carbon in the way.
Posted by: Kurt Moore at August 9, 2005 05:44 AM
I am not sure trackbacks are still working or not, but perhaps this will be interesting/useful to some USB Overdrive users:
http://www.formulateaffinity.com/?p=71
Posted by: xcopy at August 10, 2005 02:52 AM
I'm a diehard Logitech optical mouse fan here but i'll have to give the Might Mouse a shot. I can't say it would fare well (or have any advantages) for video games... but I could be wrong.
Posted by: Drunk New Orleans Guy at August 10, 2005 07:53 PM
Re: Carson Christian
I'm not sure what you mean by "I can't beleive that I have to click my mouse SIX TIMES just to get to and open an app in the top level of the Applications folder."
Are you starting at your Finder desktop and then clicking on the icon for your hard drive, and then clicking on Applications, and then clicking on the app you want to run? If so...your Kung-Fu is weak...here's some help.
Several easy ways to get to your apps come immediately to mind. If you are in the Finder, you can click on the "Go" menu and then select "Applications" (or just hit Command-Shift-A" and your apps folder will pop right up). Or, if you are looking for something a bit more reminiscent of the "Start Menu", you can drag your Applications folder (or any other folder, or your hard drive, for that matter) over to the Dock and drop it there. You will see a little line on the Dock, separating it into two sections. One section for currently running apps and apps that you have told the computer to keep in the Dock, and one other section (where the trash can is). Drag your Apps folder and drop it right next to the trash can. A shortcut/alias to your Apps folder will stay in the Dock, and if you click and hold on it (or right-click on it), BAM! There are all your apps, just go select one. This works for all other folders, too. Also, if you want to keep your frequently-used apps in the Dock all the time so you have 1-click access, when the app is running, click-and-hold on the app's Dock icon (or right-click) and a menu will pop out with the option "Keep In Dock". Select that and your app will always be there for you. Also, there is a similar drag & drop way to get shortcuts to apps to appear up in the toolbar area at the top of every Finder window. Just drag your app to the toolbar (in the area to the right of that little gear icon) while holding down the Command key. When you get there you will see a green "plus" sign. Drop the app there and BAM! Every single time you open a Finder window, you have one-click access to whatever apps you store up there. You can *also* drag folders and apps and disks to the *sidebar* on every Finder window and drop them there for **yet another** one-click access point. Or you could just make an alias/shortcut of your apps or apps folder and put it right on your Desktop, if you like clutter.
One of the beautiful things about Mac OS is that there are many many super-nifty features right underneath the surface that are still *somewhat* easy to find for the user (if you are adventurous enough to say "gee, what happens if I try dragging this thing over HERE? What if I hold down the Option key while I try this?") if you are looking for the extra features, but the noobs aren't forced to deal with them. The sucky part is, these things are poorly documented and people end up paying $25 to buy one of David Pogue's "Missing Manual" books (highly recommended for beginner/intermediate Mac users, BTW) to find out about the features!
Speaking of Sucky™, I just found out how to type special characters on Windows. Someone mentioned it to me in passing the other day. I had never even really tried to figure it out myself, considering that I live in America and no one here gives a crap if you don't use those funny little French accent marks on Café, or Céline. ;-) All I knew what that it was easy as pie on a Mac (FYI, just hold down Option and start pressing keys.) Apparently, in Windows, you hold down Alt and then type in the ASCII code for the symbol? WTF were they smoking over at Microsoft when they came up with THAT lame shit?
Anyway, hope my little mini-tutorial helped. Welcome to Macintosh.
Posted by: John Laur at August 11, 2005 01:23 AM
I can't believe nobody has mentioned SideTrack with all this talk of powerbooks and all. As essential as multibutton mice are to the 'pro' user (ie the non stupid user who likes to get things DONE with a comptuer), the inability to have a multibutton trackpad in the powerbook is a huge oversight.
Apple's little two fingering trackpad is a crowning example of misengineering. I can only hope that the same single button/multi touch technology found in the Mighty Mouse will ultimately propigate to where it is needed the most -- in the mac laptops. Until then, don't forget about Sidetrack, the wonderful replacement trackpad driver that gives you vertical and horizontal scrolling and four 'tap corners' customizable to any action -- and individually customizable in seperate applications!
If you could order SideTrack on a CD, it would be worth its weight in gold. As it is not available this way, it is worth its weight in gold an infinite number of times over.
Sidetrack at: http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/sidetrack/
I've been convinced for a long while that hardware manufacturers should simply be forbidden to write their own drivers. I'm all for the free market and stuff, but similar to closed document standards, closed driver specs are making our computing experience worse than it needs to be. A man can dream 'eh? (a.k.a. Airport Extreme for Linux was dead at birth?)