When Apple updated their store on October 20th, they quietly released updates to their iMac and Macbook lines and released new mice and remotes. After watching the new iMac video with Johnny Ives demonstrating the new mouse I couldn’t resist clicking on the purchase button from the Apple online store.

The mouse arrived Friday October 30th and I’ve been using it ever since. So lets give you a little history first before we talk about Apple’s new mouse.

The previous mouse I had was the Apple Bluetooth mighty mouse. The mouse was white, shiny and reminded me of an elongated puck. The mouse had four touch sensitive buttons – these were left, right, center and the sides (think squeeze here) – they could be programmed for anything in the OSX System preferences pane but for me they were left and right click, center was Dashboard and squeeze was to invoke Expose. The mouse also had a ball in the top forward center that was used for scrolling. This ball was the crowning point and at the same time the downfall for this mouse. The ball allowed for 360 degree scrolling – up/down and left/right for those long spreadsheets that you may have to deal with. Or my favorite scrubbing the timeline in Final Cut.

The problem with the ball though is the same problem every other mouse that ever had a ball in it ever had. Eventually dirt and debris would collect on the motion detector rollers and cause the little scroll ball to cease functioning. A little aggressive cleaning upside down on a lint free cloth sometimes helped, but over time the ball would just become less and less responsive.

The downfall here is that there is no way to get the ball out to clean the detectors, so once it’s jammed full there is no way to get it clean unless you break the mouse apart to get at the ball and rollers to clean it. Now this isn’t too hard to do – in fact I did this to my first Mighty Mouse (Now called “Apple Mouse.”) After I put it back together though it just never worked well again – so I ended up purchasing another.

So there’s the problem – now for the solution. The new Apple “Magic Mouse” – yes, Apple changed the name due to a recent court awarding the “Mighty Mouse” trademark to another company that Apple did not have a previous agreement with so Apple had to rename it’s mouse.

The Magic Mouse is the same length as the mighty mouse was, but about half the height. And honestly reminds me of the Dove soap bars in size and shape.

The bottom is the brushed aluminum that Apple has recently grown fond with. There is a switch to turn the power on and off, and speaking of power the mouse uses two AA batteries that are included with the purchase. The tracking engine has been improved over the previous model and from what I have seen, it is much more precise at tracking movements than the previous Mighty Mouse was.

There are no buttons on the mouse – it’s surface is a smooth plastic surface. You can left and right click like a traditional mouse. to scroll just use your finger to “brush” on top of the mouse in the direction you want to scroll. It even uses the inertial technique that the iPhone has where if you flick your finger quickly it will quickly scroll down the page. The scrolling is smooth, and much better than anything the Mighty Mouse had to offer.

You can also use two fingers to swipe to go forward or backward through web pages, or photos in iPhoto or Aperture. I have some issues with this because there is no real easy way for me to hold the mouse still and flick it. I have big hands and long fingers, and if I follow what’s shown in the video on the preference pane, using my palm to hold it, my fingers extend several inches past the top of the mouse.

While I find this gesture nice to have, I think it rather fails on actual usability.

Also – when right clicking, you must do it with only one finger resting on the top of the unit. If you say use one finger to left click and another to right click while leaving the opposite finger resting on the top of the mouse, the click will not register.

Installation:

When you turn on the mouse, it appears in the bluetooth preference pane, you choose it and that’s it – the mouse works. To enable the scrolling gestures, however, you need to run system update and download the mouse drivers from apple. The drivers just automagically show up in the system updates after the mouse is detected in the bluetooth pane. The mouse driver install requires a reboot, so be prepared.

As for losing the two extra buttons – I’m not heartbroken about the dashboard button – I rarely use the dashboard. But I am saddened over the loss of a button to invoke Expose – now there is a feature I use frequently. To get around this I have created the bottom left corner as a hot corner to invoke Expose and it works quite well.

Overall the mouse is what you’d expect from Apple – yes this statement is worded this way on purpose. I have found that within Mac users there are two camps – ones that LOVE the apple mouses and the others that HATE it. Well if you HATE it – you’ll probably hate this one too and would be happier with your MX revolution or whatever alternative you’ve found. But for those who actually liked to use the Mighty Mouse you’ll find the Magic mouse really is a step up in the mouse. It feels better in the hand, scrolling and tracking are much more accurate – while the loss of the two extra buttons is a pain, there are rumors that maybe Apple will have something up their sleeve in the 10.6.2 update.

Apple Store link: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB829LL/A

Pictures of my Magic Mouse unboxing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/baldingnerd/sets/72157622572830365/

so no post yesterday – I spent most of the day driving back from St. Louis. On my way out I ended up stopping at the mall and making a visit to the local Apple Store. As I was talking about this to my wife I realized I’ve sort of made a habit of visiting Apple stores each time I travel. So I decided to make it sort of a goal to try and visit stores as I go, perhaps I’ll even create a web page to track my travels.. who knows.

I’ve been toying with the idea of using my old 17″MBP as a media center. Plugging in my eye tv and turbo h.264 into it and letting it record and stream tv shows (via the iPhone application) as well as host all my ripped DVD’s in iTunes. Also by using the home sharing feature. This way the wife and I could backup our itunes libraries to the same place. I might even set up iPhoto to share as well so we have a central place to backup the iPhoto libraries as well.

I’m planning on getting the mac mini server after the first of the year, and I’m wondering how much of this I’d end up moving over to the server.

As you can see I’m still in the musing and planning process… any thoughts or suggestions?

Today I took delivery of the new MacBookPro. I’ve been pining for one since their announcement. I have the first Gen MBP that can only max at 2gb of ram and lately I’ve been hitting that limit a lot, causing the laptop to crawl.

Unboxing photos can be found here.

First Impressions -

It’s smaller than my 17″, while expected it might take a little to get used to. It’s solid – this thing just feels solid, like it’s one piece, very rugged. Runs Cooler – since it’s just out of the box and running with the less powerful GPU that might have something to do with it, but really the bar onto of the keyboard isn’t even warm yet. (owners of previous MBP will understand this.) It’s bright, yes the OLED backlight makes a huge difference, the shiny glass screen tho, well I will have to get over it, the colors pop but now and then I can see the logo from my sweatshirt staring at me. Trackpad – I thought this was going to bug me, really it’s no different in the feel – button or not, I still use thumb to press button and finger to move about. I like the new finger gestures.

Setup was a snap, it tied me to my Mobile Me account quickly, and with the new 802.11n wifi (was on g) the updates took not too long to install. As for migration, I’ve decided to do it manually. I have a lot of apps and pref panes on my original MBP that I rarely use, so I will install apps on my new MBP on a as needed basis.

I’ve had an AppleTV since they were announced, I’ve used it off and on – was happy when they released the 2.0 software and have even rented a few flicks on it. It’s a great little gadget, but what I always hated about it was the fact that it had a 30gb hdd, which meant it had no room for my 200+ movies and 100+ tv shows, I could set up obscure syncing rules, but it always resulted in long syncs over wifi from my MBP to 

the AppleTV, and most of my library is on an external disk – which isn’t always attached. I’ve tried using airdisks (NAS mounted volumes on my Airport Extreme and Time Capsule) and the results were less than impressive, long times to start the movie, constant pauses and stutters. 

What I really wanted was to use that USB port on the back of the AppleTV and mount an external drive with all my media. Sure there were all sorts of ways, cracking open the case, adding services to the drive, tweaking settings, etc.. but I just wasn’t up to opening the AppleTV – why risk breaking something that I wanted to keep working?

I recently heard of a product called aTV flash – it basically is a software pkg you pay for and then download, it’s set up to copy itself to an USB stick, you then pop that into the AppleTV port and reboot – it software hacks the AppleTV for you – adding FTP, SSH support, a few media managers like Saphire and a menu that allows you to play ripped DVD VOB folder without having to encode them.

The install was a little wonky – I had to download 3 different software packages to enable all the features I wanted like USB HDD and AFP support. But in the end I have to say I am impressed. I can now hook up a USB drive to the back of the AppleTV that contains all my movies and TV shows and finally for the first time have instant access to my entire library.

New iPod nano’s expected – new colors, not really expected, but pretty cool. If I had a reason to get a new iPod I’d be eyeing the blue one myself. As for iTunes 8.0 – was expected as well, I saw a leak about Genius, but never understood what exactly it would do – I am pretty impressed with it so far, and am listening to a playlist made by it currently.

Definitely happy to see iPhone firmware 2.1 coming out (I hear Friday). Can’t wait, hopefully stability will return to the land of iPhone. I haven’t had too much trouble with it, but there are others out there that have to do a restore darn near every day.