Two buttons = two fingers to users

The single-button mouse philosophy of Apple was the most obvious and trivial criticism of Macs that PC advocates could level. I remember one of the editors at NATS, a London post-production house, told me that the reason he didn't like Macs was because he preferred mice with two buttons.

Now you've been able to use two-button mice straight out of the box with Macs since the advent of OS X, and it was OS 8 that introduced contextual menus to the Mac world back in 1997. So it's not like you couldn't buy a Mac and then add a £25 two-button mouse if you really wanted to. The multi-button mouse was a totem of PC-dom to bash Macs with.

So why Apple's resistance to two-button mice for so long? Why does Apple effectively make Mighty Mouse a single button mouse until you instruct the OS otherwise? And why isn't Mighty Mouse the default mouse on new Macs?

First reason: it confuses new users. Talk to a tech support guy about the frustration in explaining what "right click" means to a new user already confused by their computer and you'll understand what the problem is. The mouse click metaphor is that you're pointing at and choosing an item. What the hell does "right click" mean in that context? You're using your fingernail to do something while you're pointing? It's just not something that corresponds to our normal everyday activities.

Second, and most important reason: developers. Give a developer an inch and they hide every useful feature they can think of in the last place you'd expect. In particular, unleash a Windows developer and they'll stick just about everything into contextual menus (aka right-click menus). Apple's Human Interface Guidelines explicitly state that if you have a command, you should have several ways of accessing it - a menu, keyboard shortcut, through another command, a contextual menu and so on – the reason being it makes life a whole lot easier for users who don't know where the particular function they need might be. After all, is it intrinsically obvious to most users that to move a file in Windows, they could right-click on it, select Cut and then Paste it somewhere else? What does cut and paste even mean with files? Most users will instead just drag and drop to move their files, because that's more obvious to them.

A determined developer who doesn't think about usability will ignore this. Case in point: one of my clients is upgrading their web content management system to something called The Matrix (message to Australia: well done on making a good film, but you don't have to name everything after it now). Now, leaving aside the fact that The Matrix requires anyone accessing it to have a browser capable of Java 1.4 at the least, which will give said client a lot of trouble (small publishing company using Macs therefore: typical upgrade cycle: wait till it's broken before we replace it; typical Mac lifespan 5+ years. So, in case I need to join the dots for you – they're all on OS 9 Macs and even Java 1.3 is a distant dream to them), most of the functionality the applet offers is available – you guessed it – through right clicks.

As mentioned, Macs can handle two-button mice very well, but those spanners at Apple decided to implement right-click detection in Java differently from the rest of the right-clicking world. That's fine if the developer makes a slight amendment to the code to support right-clicks in both environments. But The Matrix's developers haven't (I've dropped them a note to let them know the issue. Let's see what happens). This wouldn't be a problem if the functions available within the contextual menus were available elsewhere. But they're not, meaning that for no really good reason, it's impossible for Macs to use most of the capabilities of this system. And while Mac users are the most obvious victims of this approach, Windows users suffer as well: said client is going to have to put everybody on a training course to understand this system, but is naturally concerned that it'll end up not getting used if it turns out to be too difficult.

What do you think's going to happen? I'll let you know in three years' time.