derek derek derek

I use a Logitech MX Revolution, which is an absolutely fantastic mouse.  The frictionless scroll wheel is reason alone to choose it, but Logitech for some strange reason can’t write an OS X driver to save their lives. Their version for 10.4 and lower used a third party hack to allow programmability of the buttons.  For Leopard, Apple tightened up these hacks a bit, so Logitech had to do something, and instead of writing proper drivers, they updated Logitech Control Center to work with their own Input Manager (read: hack) to allow button programmability.  This hack causes all sorts of problems, things that you would never attribute to your mouse.  Textmate CLI not working, subversion not being able to perform diffs between specific revisions, random crashes, etc.

Since I got my new iMac last week, I decided I would finally give a third party mouse management app a try so I did not have to suffer the corruption that is LCC.  Derek Allard and I had a brief discussion about what apps were out there, and it turns out neither of us had tried any of them.  Being keyboarders at heart, we’re both multi-button mouse people wanting to maximize the productivity we can have for those moments we have to have one hand on the mouse.  He went with USB Overdrive, and I ControllerMate.

I highly recommend ControllerMate, but don’t bother trying it until you have a solid 30 minutes to an hour.  It’s interface, resembling more of a UI one might use to modify the skills and attributes of a character in a complex video game, is entirely unlike anything you’ve used before.  After you discover how everything is connected, though, the power you are enabled with becomes immediately apparent.  I have one combination of mouse buttons that will type a phrase for me, and then position the cursor caret within the phrase where I need to make an adjustment, for a commonly used message I type when moving posts in the ExpressionEngine discussion forum.  Wicked cool.  Oh, and if my hand’s not on the mouse, I have a keyboard trigger that will do the same thing, using Many Tricks’ Butler app.