Apple announced more then one button mouse, users say “at last”

Apple has announced the launch of Mighty Mouse, its new Gen-X mouse, which the company claims will render the use of a Mac even more easy and powerful.

Mighty Mouse, priced at $49, offers users the option of four independently programmable buttons, without taking away from the simplicity factor made possible by a single-button mouse. Apple's new mouse incorporates a scroll ball, which enables users to scroll horizontally, vertically and diagonally, so that they can create music, edit videos or view photographs and web pages with considerable ease. Mighty Mouse features a single seamless enclosure with programmable touch sensors acting as primary or secondary buttons. This allows users to rapidly access contextual menus in Mac OS X applications, to launch iChat or Safari and to access Tiger features like Expose, Dashboard and Spotlight. Commenting on the product launch, David Moody, vice president, worldwide Mac product marketing, Apple, said, "With Mighty Mouse, we've simply built a better mouse. With its innovative Scroll Ball and unique integration of multiple buttons, Mighty Mouse adds functionality, while retaining the elegant, easy-to-use Apple design", informs Techtree.

While the Windows PC world has for years used multibutton mice, Apple has been a holdout. The Macintosh software design allowed for multibutton mice, but Apple shied away from such a design despite much grumbling among Macintosh users, who have been forced to use both hands as well as the control keys on the computer keyboard to perform certain functions.

The mouse was invented in 1964 by Douglas Engelbart, a legendary computer researcher at Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International. William English, who helped Mr. Engelbart design the mouse, said it had three buttons not because of any well-conceived design, but because there was room for three micro switches in the wood case fashioned by the SRI machine shop, reports New York Times.