To be fair, this is more about fighting Logitech’s software, so the Mac is kind of off the hook for this one.
Even though I got the G703 mouse working in Part 1 I ended up moving it back permanently to the PC, mainly due to the hassle of plugging and unplugging the USB charging cable.
Instead, I switched over to a spare Logitech Marathon M705 mouse that I bought on sale “just in case.” And just in case has arrived!
It’s a nice mouse, has side buttons, works wirelessly, and has incredibly long battery life. Best of all, the Unifying receiver that plugs into any standard USB port is tiny. I plugged in said receiver and the mouse began working immediately…but with only the left, right and middle mouse buttons working (see Part 1 for more gruesome details on this).
However, the Logitech Unifying Software (LUS) would allow me to program all the buttons. All I had to do was flip the power button on the bottom of the mouse, flip it back on and wait for the LUS to detect it. Once detected, smiles all around.
Except this happened:
Undaunted, I turned to the tips hidden behind the Troubleshooting information button. This lead me to discover I had another unifying receiver and a not-unifying-but-still-Logitech receiver plugged into my PC. I removed those (the devices they were used for are long gone), but this made no difference. Another tip said to shut down any device that might be synced up to a receiver and I do have a Surface Pro 3 (in the bedroom) and a ThinkPad (to my immediate left). I may have used this mouse with one of them, but the knowledge is lost to the sand of time. Or the sands in my brain. The ThinkPad is currently installing a Windows update because that’s what Windows computers do, but when it’s done, I’ll shut it down. The SP3 is probably on the edge of where a receiver would reach, but I’ll also shut it down and see what happens. But not right now, because it’s getting late and my wrangling-with-technology timer just went DING.
I am not giving up hope, but am leaning toward needing a third party tool or divine intervention to get those precious mouse side buttons working.
I’ve had a few days to acclimate to working with a Mac for an extended period of time. I normally use my MacBook Pro for an hour or so at most and haven’t spent a lot of time tweaking with its settings like I would a desktop computer. Now that I have a Mac mini, which indeed sits on my desktop, I’ve been diving into settings to make it work the way I want it to. The experience has been…interesting.
Today I am going to talk about one thing: mouse support.
Mouse support in macOS is bad. It’s like a lot of Apple’s mice in that regard. Bad hardware, meet bad software!
Here are some of the bad things:
No “snap to default button in dialogs” like in Windows
No automatic support for third or fourth mouse buttons
Even with some settings maxed out, the mouse still feels a bit sluggish compared to how it operates in Windows
While the first and third items on the list are either subjective or more “nice to have” features, supporting the side buttons on a mouse is pretty fundamental. It’s not 1985 anymore. Mice have more than one button.
I was not actually aware of this because most of my Mac experience has been using a keyboard or a trackpad. When I plugged in my wireless Logitech G703 mouse, it was instantly recognized and worked without any fuss. Yay. But then I discovered the two side buttons would not work. Or rather, they worked in weird ways. In Firefox, pressing Button 3 (the one normally assigned as Back) would result in the same action as pressing the middle mouse button, which is to produce a weird little circular symbol on screen that lets you scroll up and down by moving the mouse. It’s a feature that I’m pretty sure no one ever has ever used on purpose after scroll wheels became a thing.
A mini mouse crisis was now underway.
The Logitech Gaming Software (LGS) showed the buttons correctly mapped as Forward and Back, but the Mac remained unconvinced. I began to investigate using my well-honed Google skills. This led me to try third party tools like BetterTouchTool, which did indeed allow me to map the buttons the way I wanted–nay, the way nature intended! But I didn’t really want to use a separate program just to get the buttons to function the way they would in any sensible operating system. I poked around some more and found that Command-[ is a near-universal key command for Back.
I went into the LGS and assigned Button 3 to Command-[. After doing this the LGS software now showed the button labelled with the keyboard shortcut as seen below.
And at least for now, using the Back button on the mouse does just that–it goes back. It’s even working in Finder, which kind of surprises me.
Searching, testing and playing around with settings for this consumed a decent chunk of the evening. For something that works without any configuration needed at all in Windows. I’m not saying Windows is better. But in this case, Windows is way better.
Perhaps mouse support will be improved in macOS XI.
Today is the 35th anniversary of the original Macintosh. Since I am old enough to have lived through personal computer prehistory, I remember the original Mac well.
In 1985–only a scant year after its introduction–I worked on a Macintosh Plus as part of a job entry program in a small publishing/advertising firm in Duncan. The Macintosh Plus came with what was then a staggering one megabyte of ram and this particular model had two floppy disk drives, one internal, one external, so you didn’t need to switch out floppies. Convenient!
I mostly worked on simple ad blurbs and also did entry for a database (I forget the actual software, but it would be pretty easy to find, I imagine). I spent most of my time writing a parody of Friday the 13th using MacWrite. I printed out hard copy on the LaserWriter Plus (this company either had lots of money or lots of debt) and still have that same hard copy kicking around somewhere. I may even have the floppy disks stuffed away in a box.
Since the Macintosh was ludicrously expensive back then (even more than today’s models in relative terms), my own computer was a Commodore 64, which was inferior to the Macintosh in most ways, except it had color graphics and about ten million more games.
The closest I came to owning a Mac back then is when the Macintosh was offered for student discount while I was attending university in 1990. It was around $1,000 as I recall. By then I had an Amiga, which in many ways was a better machine and cost a lot less, so I never went Mac.
That changed in 2013 when I finally got my first laptop, a MacBook Air, then regarded by many as the best all-around laptop. I was too used to Windows, though, and the display was actually not that great, so I ultimately sold it for a Surface Pro 3 the following year.
I returned to the fold (while keeping the SP3) in late 2016 when I picked up the updated MacBook Pro without the goofy Touch Bar (the Touch Bar-free version was the most reasonably-priced–and it still cost $1799). macOS had matured and was a lot more refined, the haptic trackpad was awesome and it had a bright, sharp display. The battery life was only average, but it met my needs. Unfortunately, the ultra-shallow keyboard was something I learned to merely tolerate, not really like, and when you use a laptop for writing, that’s not a great thing. And this was before all the issues with the butterfly keyboard mechanism became known.
I still have the MacBook Pro, with two years left of free service if the keyboard goes south. I’ve actually been using it more recently, as I toy with the idea of going back to Macs for writing (I make the decision tomorrow, per my self-imposed deadline).
When I look at the current Mac line, it makes me a little sad. It could be so much more, but Apple has gotten so big and so reliant on the iPhone that the Mac is playing not just second fiddle, but third, after the iPhone and iPad.
Apple’s attempts at innovation on recent Macs have all been failures:
The 2013 Mac Pro was fatally flawed by its design, which led to heat issues and throttling. Apple also seemed to assume “pros” wanted a small computer that they would plug every sort of upgrade into, creating an ungainly mess of cables and peripherals. Nope.
The 2016 update to the MacBook Pro introduced the Touch Bar and raised the prices significantly. A couple of years later and the Touch Bar has really been a bit of a dud. It’s never been expanded beyond the Pro laptops and feels like an afterthought now.
The MacBook in 2015 introduced the butterfly keyboard, which was divisive due to its extremely shallow keys. Some people love it, as it requires a very light touch, but many dislike it for the same reason. It was also kind of loud for a laptop keyboard. Worse, it was prone to a number of flaws, like keys getting stuck, or registering multiple times, or just not working at all. Apple has revised the keyboard twice and the same issues are still being reported. They really need to chuck the design altogether, especially since it is now used across all of their laptops. I give this a 50/50 chance of happening in 2020.
Even the revised Mac mini, after being neglected for four years, emerged with flaws–cheap thermal paste that results in the machine throttling easily, expensive and with piddly specs on the base model. At least they finally killed the 5400 rpm hard drive it came with in favor of SSDs (that are glued and cannot be upgraded or replaced by the user).
So while I consider a return of sorts to the Mac, it’s only as an adjunct to my PC and likely through either a dock with my MBP or through a hackintosh I’d build from an Intel NUC.
Still, happy anniversary to the first personal computer to popularize the graphical user interface. Despite my gripes, the Macintosh had a huge, undeniable impact on personal computing.
This post was made on a MacBook Pro without touch bar because I don’t need a stinking* touch bar, especially not for $400 extra.
There are a few things about the new MacBook Pro I remain unconvinced about but here’s a short list of my current pros and cons.
Pros
the screen is gorgeous
the touchpad is gigantic but doesn’t seem to be picking up false positives so far
the SSD is fast and general performance seems fairly brisk, even as it continues to index things
it’s reasonably light and thin
space gray looks spiffy
I can finally stop comparison-shopping laptops for awhile
Cons
only two USB-C ports. Stop being cheap, Apple, especially on things you’re selling for $1899 Canadian
Processor and WiFi should both be better for the price
TBD
the butterfly mechanism used in the keyboard. It has very little travel (which is not a big deal as I don’t mind low-travel keyboards) but it’s also rather clicky, something I don’t really care for on a laptop.
battery life. I haven’t used it long enough to really judge but reports indicate most people are getting around 5-7 hours instead of the promised “up to 10 hours.” Seven hours would be fine most of the time for me but more is always better.
Now that I have the laptop I must write great things on it. Great things indeed. Soon.
* actual touch bar likely does not produce any odor
