Squeak! Its a Two-Button Mouse for Your Mac!Squeak! Its a Two-Button Mouse for Your Mac!

If youre looking for the perfect holiday present for your business Macintosh users, buy each and every one a two-button mouse.A two-button mouse will, quite honestly, double the productivity of any Mac user. More than double.

With Apple, the one-button mouse is a religious issue, allegedly going back to a dictate from Steve Jobs about simplicity. I cant speak to the truth of that, but I can tell you that for years, non-Apple applications for the Mac have taken strong advantage of the right mouse button to bring up additional context menu choices. With the advent of Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah in 2001, the right mouse button became important within the Finder itself, and in Apples own applications.

For example, on the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard desktop, right-clicking a folder brings up a context menu that lets you move an item to trash, get information, compress the folder, duplicate the folder, make an alias, assign it a color-coded label, and lots more besides. (You can simulate a right-click with Control-Click, but that's slow and inefficient.)

Core Apple apps like iTunes and Mail are hugely more productive with a two-button mouse. Non-Apple applications, like Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, QuarkXpress and others, virtually depend on the right mouse button (or Control-Click) for most common tasks. Some applications literally depend on right clicking.

The mouse that I personally use on a desktop is a Microsoft Trackball Optical. Sadly, its discontinued. Fortunately, I have five of them.

When my Mac-based employees get a new computer, I routinely provide them with a two-button mouse, and discard the Apple one. Generally, the choice is between a full-sized mouse and a smaller one. Many employees have smaller hands and prefer a smaller "notebook" mouse. We keep lots of them around.

The two mice that I offer most frequently are the Logitech LX3 Optical Mouse and the Logitech V100 Optical Mouse for Notebooks. If employees prefer other mice, thats fine. However, I do recommend against wireless mice. I find their reliability to be poor, and employees are generally frustrated with them.