Mighty Mouse hits the stores
Well, a tiny bit of hell froze over the other day when Apple released a mouse with more than one button.
The “Mighty Mouse”, however, retains Apple’s typical cutting edge design in that it looks like it has exactly NO buttons when in reality it has four. Like everything else that comes from Apple it’s hard to explain and almost has to be touched to be believed but the Mighty Mouse (which also works with Windows XP or 2000) is yet another work of art from Apple.
It really comes alive with Tiger, the latest version of Apple’s operating system because hidden under the shell of the mouse are sensors that bring up Tiger’s Dashboard seemingly whenever you sort of will it to appear.
I tend to believe mice (mices? mouses?) are a personal thing and hard to recommend one sight-unseen but overall this one is a lovely albeit pricey thing at $50. It is pretty small compared to the Microsoft mice of the current genre so if you have large hands you may want to try one in person before you buy.
It connects via
---In other Apple news, you may recall that Apple announced earlier this year that it was going to move its entire production to Intel chips sometime next year, raising the spectre of an idea that the Apple operating system would one day run on non-Apple hardware.
Apple czar Steve Jobs said “absolutely not” because part of the Apple experience is the wonderful Apple hardware. However, last week several Web sites purported to show leaked beta Apple code running on Windows machines, including photos of Apple OS X running on a Dell laptop. The hack supposedly bypasses Intel’s Trusted Platform Module which is supposed to protect the OS from installing on non-Apple hardware.
How this all sorts out is anyone’s guess but the code allegedly is out there on the Internet. (I personally share Job’s guess that OS X on an E-machine would be rather horrifying but that’s something for another day I guess.)
---Lastly, Appleinsider.com reported last week that Microsoft appears to hold many of the patents on what later became the Ipod. It turns out Microsoft beat Apple to the Patent office by five months for a "portable, pocked-sized multimedia asset player". In what could become a pretty cruel twist of fate, Steve Jobs could end up writing a large check to the world’s richest man, bazillionaire Bill Gates.
WEEKLY
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm, and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email address is jim@cyberdads.com
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