Dissecting Mighty Mouse
Ars Technica has gone and done the gutsy move of dissecting the now-rare Apple Mighty Mouse, much to my eternal and devilish delight. The operation confirmed a number of things about the curious little device, such as the fact that there really is a speaker inside that replaces tacticle feedback with audio, something that's never quite settled well with me. What's interesting, though, is how the right-click comes into play.
Even the lightest touches on the left side of the mouse registers a "button 1" event in Xev and keeping your finger millimeters off the surface during a click generates a "button 3" (right) click event. If the left sensor registers any contact, a left-click event is dispatched and if the left sensor is not depressed, you can infer that the user is pushing on the right side.
What this means is that so long as your skin is not touching the sensors above where the left button is supposed to be, the mouse assumes that you are clicking elsewhere, in this case, on the right, which it then executes. But what about users like me, who like to keep two fingers on a mouse for efficiency? Does this mean that a user has to resort to one-finger clicking, the distant cousin of the "chicken-peck" typing style with two fingers? Still not convinced, but it was fun reading about how the Apple Store reacted when they called to say they took it apart and needed a new one.
Dissecting Mighty Mouse [Ars Technica]