On the first day the Magic Mouse was available—well, not so much available as it was shipping with new iMacs, so available to play with in the Apple Store—I went to try it out. While I didn’t think it was the best thing since sliced bread (or any other such amazing invention), I did think it was solid enough to be worth buying, especially since I’ve been having to unstick the scrollball on my bluetooth Mighty Mouse just about weekly of late. On about half a dozen occasions since then, I’ve been close enough to an Apple Store to wander in and see if they had any Magic Mice for sale, but had no luck until tonight.
The packaging is simple and elegant, a clear plastic shell, though it would have been more elegant without the huge white label added by the Apple Store along one long side, which covered the seam in the box and made it much harder to open than intended and left all sorts of sticky gunk behind. Batteries are included and pre-installed. Swapping it in for my bluetooth Mighty Mouse was as simple as turning it on, asking my Mac to set up a bluetooth device, clicking a few times, and turning off the old mouse. The Magic Mouse is lighter and flatter than the Mighty Mouse (though heavier than the USB version).
Left and right clicking (once enabled) work just like on the Mighty Mouse. Scrolling is nice and the momentum is a nice add-on. Forward/backward swipes for navigation work, though I find the gestures a bit awkward (I played with these in the store when I first laid hand on the mouse). I’d long ago disabled the side buttons on my Mighty Mouse, so I don’t miss those one bit. As for middle-clicking (clicking on top of the scrollball), had the Magic Mouse hit about 3 months earlier, I wouldn’t have cared at all, but somewhere in the past few months I’ve gotten in the habit of using the middle click to open links in new tabs and close tabs, both in Firefox and in Chrome, so I wasn’t looking forward to losing it. A quick search led me to this program (actually, this version, as the other one doesn’t seem to work as consistently) which works like a charm—once set up, physically click with 3 fingers on the surface to middle-click (the program defaults to a 3-finger tap, rather than physical click, and is supposed to work on multitouch trackpads as well).
So, my first-hour opinion: worth it to me, may or may not be worth it to you.
