Mac Mighty Mouse Review

So today I went out and purchased a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse. Quite frankly I like it, I find the lack of visible buttons to be a slight annoyance when trying to find which end of the mouse I am holding but aside from that I have to admit, it is a nice mouse.


Usability: This mouse has had no problems, the options to configure it are quite useful and have a lot of power behind them. It can be quite sensitive and is more accurate than anything I've used before. The scrolling on the mouse is wonderful. Especially if you work on large images and scroll around a lot. The buttons are a little hard to find at times, sometimes I will click what I THINK is the middle button and it is actually the right click button. Really wouldn't suggest this mouse for gaming though. The side buttons are an interesting addition, squeeze the mouse it does something, nice idea. Quite frankly it is poorly implemented and I probably won't use it much. Too much force is required. If they made them more sensitive it would be more useful.

Ergonomics: Ok, this is an issue for me, I spend a large amount of time using a mouse for doing stuff in Illustrator and 3ds Max. If a mouse is uncomfortable in my hand I'm not gonna use it. I have a trackpad and am fully able to use it as efficiently as a mouse. It just is more tiring. This mouse fits in my hand, but I have small hands. So personally, I would go try one out in the store before buying one. The real gripe is those side buttons.

Style: Face it, Mac is about pretty things. Deny it all you want, your Mac gets you horny. So you want a mouse that when you put your hand on it turns you on more. This mouse will. Unlike most mice it is smooth and rounded as opposed to some monstrosities that basically suck your hand into them with all their holes and stuff. Only complaint about the styling, only one color. Remember the old saying, "You can have any color you want as long as its beige," yeah not what I expected from Apple. I have a Macbook Pro, it is made out of aluminum, I don't want a white mouse. I want more metal. What about those people who paid the $200 extra for a Blackbook? Do they want a white mouse? No way. So here is my plea to Apple, come out with either skins for the mouse, or release it to match the colors of your products.

Overall, I like the mouse. It is really responsive, very accurate, and most importantly simple to use. Oh, and the reason I went with Bluetooth is because I have a serious lack of USB ports. Seriously, I know we have a Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 port too but most things come as USB unless you pay like $20 or more extra. So, Apple, give me another USB Port. Oh and while
I'm griping about the MBP, who's idea was it to put the slot loading drive in the front? And how about a card reader? Just some personal complaints. Nothing major.

Machines for the Living

Oh no this isn't going to be about any new health care, I feel that we already take care of others far too much in this society. Darwinism needs to come back, maybe that would silence some of those creationists. Anyway, no this is about how I feel that society has lost its ability to govern itself. The fact is that most people are not educated enough to think for themselves, this is not their fault, the purpose of the American educational system is not to make someone think for themselves, in fact it is quite the opposite. American education was designed to create factory workers out of us, factory workers and consumers. We are not raised to think independently of the advertising firms and the television stations that feed us propaganda. I tend to read a lot of sites relating to freedoms and liberties, quite frankly they are all mindless drivel, society does not want freedom, they want comfort, they want people to tell them what to do, where to be, how to do everything. So here is how I'm gonna take care of that, or at least here is my idea. We write a program that learns and evolves over time, basing its logic on past experience. The feedback could be retrieved from the people in real time and the machine could process the inputs. Now clearly only a certain percentage of the population should have the ability to influence this machine, and these people must be unaware. So we implant chips in all children born, the catch is 90% of them will be nothing more than placebos. Of course the people are unaware so they FEEL like they are doing some good. This does two things, it allows that number to slowly be phased out over time and remove all power from the people and rest if solely in the hands, metaphorical of course, of this machine god we have created. And of course, it allows us to monitor various factors about the population in real time without their knowledge.

Sound awfully Orwellian to you? It isn't, Orwellian society, like all societies, is vulnerable to human greed. Machines don't feel pleasure or pain and therefore their surroundings are not taken into their decisions. So long as their decisions do not harm themselves they will always make the proper decisions based on inputs from the populace. Also in Orwell's 1984 the people KNEW they were being monitored all the time so there was a need for police, what about instead of police each chip contains a small dose of poison which would be injected into the blood stream under various circumstances.

Now, this seems radical doesn't it? Crazy even. I assure you it is not nearly as crazy as what is happening right now. How many have heard of Real ID? How about RFID? Does RFID scare anyone but me? Human beings being branded with a label that can be read by anything scares me a lot. So fine, its not exactly a chip that can kill you but it's just a step away. They can track you 24/7, with the prevalence of cameras they can watch you. And with the invisibility of certain portions of the government they can kill you when they want and how they want. Do you honestly think that the upper 1% that runs our government really cares what you think? Nope they don't, not one bit. And you know what, they don't care if we know because we can't do a thing to them, they have all the power. So it all comes down to, which do you trust, dishonest, slimy politicians who serve their own agenda, or logical computers who serve THEIR own agenda as proscribed by the people? Me? I choose the machine god, I trust them a lot more than I trust humans. Humans are flawed beings, incapable of logical decision making. They have no perspective. Machines do.

So there, I say we build a machine god. I say we kiss what few freedoms goodbye so that we can lose them to a machine that is actually working for the good as opposed to losing them to the politicians who are working for their bottom lines.

Take this post how you will, satire against the current regime, or as serious, truly it does not matter to me, either way I get my point across. Stuff needs to change in this world or we are all well and truly screwed.

Web Design

Well, I may not be a professional web designer or anything but I know what I think looks good so I am compiling a listing of personal peeves about websites.

• Marquee tags
  
• They are ugly and cause a distraction. The human eye is automatically attracted to motion. When an object is moving on a website the reader finds it hard to focus on the real content of a website. I find this a lot in advertisements. Never use the marquee tag. It should be discontinued and deleted from the rendering engines. If you simply have to make something move use javascript and place it where you want it to end up. that way you allow the user the option of disabling javascript and thus not having to watch the logo of your company scroll across the screen CONSTANTLY! If you simply must use it, though I can't think of a case when you have to do not use it around a picture. Moving text is distracting enough but a moving picture is just nasty. Plus moving pictures requires the reader's computer to re-render that picture every so often which taxes the cpu/gpu. Be environmentally friendly and don't use marquee.
• Useless information in the title bar.
• Web browsers are going away from the one window one website methodology that persisted for years. Every major browser, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino, even Minimo, has tabs in it. If I see Home in a half dozen tabs how am I going to quickly find which tab I am looking for? My suggestion would be website name - page. So for example New York Times - Opinion would be a nice name for the Opinion page on the New York Times website. Reversing this would be fine too.
  
• Color Schemes
• Ok, honestly if you want people to read your site don't punish them. Keep your colors rather neutral. Use deeper, darker colors over a more neutral background. Under no circumstances should you ever use bright colors for a background. If you do you are a #F00. I'm sorry for that joke (for anyone who doesn't get it, #F00 is hex shorthand for 255,0,0 which is RED and it looks like fool). It causes eye strain to look at a bright background for any period of time. Also on CRT monitors it takes more energy to show bright colors than darker ones but if you are concerned about the environmental impact of your computer you are probably already using a LCD screen. Also for your background try to stay away from pictures. If you cannot avoid a picture make sure it tiles and looks well, there are other resolutions besides your own, and make sure that it is not busy or particularly bright. Text should also not be 'OMG Bright' instead it should be a color that contrasts enough with the background color. Try looking at a color wheel. They are usually obscenely bright but if you darken the colors a bit you should be able to come up with a decent scheme. For examples of what not to do, try checking myspace some time.
• Advertisements
• Advertisements bug the crap out of everyone. The fact of it is that without ads a lot of sites wouldn't be up. They pay hosting fees and writer's fees. How can ads be incorporated into a website without it looking bad? Try looking here to see how adds can be incorporated into a site without taking over. Yes, it is a google search. The adds are a link and a short blurb or text. Stuff I hate seeing in an ad on a website includes:
• Moving graphics - see marquee tag
• Sound - If I am listening to music and I hear some guy yelling about buying their product not only am I not going to buy the product I am going to leave the site with the ad.
• Pop-ups - There is a valid use for a pop-up. There is a valid use for a pop-up. There is a valid use for a pop-up. No, there isn't unless you are doing a web application. Just avoid them. Sometimes I suppose web servers are infected with them, just get on your hosting company to get their act together, you are paying them to host you they better get a decent firewall and virus protection that works.
• Sound
  
• Sound is a nice thing, really it is, but just because you want to listen to Mozart while browsing does not mean I do. Please, if you want to put links to music fine. If you want to embed it allow me to turn it on and off.
• Flash based websites.
• My problem with them is simple, you see that back arrow in the top of your browser? Try using that in a flash based website. Recall tabs? Useless. And maybe someone wants to bookmark your page Lisa's Blog- Tuna Fish Casserole. If it is flash based they can't. They an only bookmark the start of the flash movie and then have to navigate to the Tuna Fish page again. I don't care how good that fish is, I would go to another site. Don't get me wrong, Flash is useful for dynamic content but the whole site should never be done in Flash.

I think I have exhausted my thoughts for now. Try to listen to them and resist the urge to add 8 billion youtube videos to your page. Any pages I see doing that will instantly be relegated to the Hall of Website shame (otherwise known as myspace). One last rule of thumb, if you are 8 and designed a myspace page, please, I beg you, do not claim to know HTML. Do not claim that you can design pages, quite frankly I doubt it is even possible to make a myspace page not suck. Oh, and if you disagree with these or want to add, there is a comments link for a reason.