MX1000 review
I just got an MX1000 for work, and on the whole it's a pretty nice mouse. I was using an MX500 before, though, and there are some areas where I think the 500 has the edge.
1. The Scroll wheel on the 1000 has a very cheap feeling button. I had grown accustomed to pressing it as a middle button with the 500, and I had bound command-click to it (see more about this later). This is handy for opening windows in new tabs.
2. The buttons on the 1000 are generally better. The microscopic, round buttons from the previous MX mice are gone. This is an improvement. However, the thumb buttons are useless to me, and the vital application-switcher button was relocated to the thumb area. I find that using the thumb buttons has always been cumbersome. Luckily, I never used the "cruise" features, so I moved some of the buttons around in the setup utility preference pane. This worked fine for me.
3. On the topic of the preference pane, it is the same pane for all Logitech mice. Personally, I think it is exceptionally good, and having used the mice on X and XP, I can say that the Mac has the better setup utility. It integrates into the system really nicely, still allowing you to use the system's pref pane for mice and keyboards, and provide MORE functionality than the windows version with none of the bullshit that always seems to accompany windows programs. The one big victory here is that on the mac, a keystroke can be bound to a button along with a click. I have option-click and command-click bound to mouse buttons. This is awesome. On my PC, I was unable to set up a control-click. In my opinion, this is a huge deal.
4. The other side of the coin is that the drivers are better for windows. I needed to use MouseZoom to get the pointer to track at an acceptable speed, as it's native speed is way too fast. It also has some pretty strange acceleration issues, since I have a harder time pinpointing specific targets with it. I like a really low-acceleration mouse. This mouse doesn't seem to use acceleration, which sucks. On windows, this is much more configurable. On both platforms, however, the tracking is excellent. This mouse is exceptionally smooth.
5. It is a laser mouse, and is advertised to work on all sorts of laminates that give optical mice the jitters. Generally I have found this to be 100% true. It works great on my shiny desk. The battery seems to last damn near forever, and even so it has a switch on the bottom to turn it off, so that it won't track its laser all around the inside of your bag when you're traveling. On the negative side, it's a bit heavy, but all cordless mice seem to share this dilemma.
Final verdict: This is a solid mouse, and it can work quite well in a dual or single OS environment. If you are a CAD user, like I am, you'll realize that the drivers still need some work on the mac side, and the setup still needs some work on the PC side. If you're not, just realize that it's a good cordless mouse that works on shiny desks, and you'll probably love it from the get-go.
1. The Scroll wheel on the 1000 has a very cheap feeling button. I had grown accustomed to pressing it as a middle button with the 500, and I had bound command-click to it (see more about this later). This is handy for opening windows in new tabs.
2. The buttons on the 1000 are generally better. The microscopic, round buttons from the previous MX mice are gone. This is an improvement. However, the thumb buttons are useless to me, and the vital application-switcher button was relocated to the thumb area. I find that using the thumb buttons has always been cumbersome. Luckily, I never used the "cruise" features, so I moved some of the buttons around in the setup utility preference pane. This worked fine for me.
3. On the topic of the preference pane, it is the same pane for all Logitech mice. Personally, I think it is exceptionally good, and having used the mice on X and XP, I can say that the Mac has the better setup utility. It integrates into the system really nicely, still allowing you to use the system's pref pane for mice and keyboards, and provide MORE functionality than the windows version with none of the bullshit that always seems to accompany windows programs. The one big victory here is that on the mac, a keystroke can be bound to a button along with a click. I have option-click and command-click bound to mouse buttons. This is awesome. On my PC, I was unable to set up a control-click. In my opinion, this is a huge deal.
4. The other side of the coin is that the drivers are better for windows. I needed to use MouseZoom to get the pointer to track at an acceptable speed, as it's native speed is way too fast. It also has some pretty strange acceleration issues, since I have a harder time pinpointing specific targets with it. I like a really low-acceleration mouse. This mouse doesn't seem to use acceleration, which sucks. On windows, this is much more configurable. On both platforms, however, the tracking is excellent. This mouse is exceptionally smooth.
5. It is a laser mouse, and is advertised to work on all sorts of laminates that give optical mice the jitters. Generally I have found this to be 100% true. It works great on my shiny desk. The battery seems to last damn near forever, and even so it has a switch on the bottom to turn it off, so that it won't track its laser all around the inside of your bag when you're traveling. On the negative side, it's a bit heavy, but all cordless mice seem to share this dilemma.
Final verdict: This is a solid mouse, and it can work quite well in a dual or single OS environment. If you are a CAD user, like I am, you'll realize that the drivers still need some work on the mac side, and the setup still needs some work on the PC side. If you're not, just realize that it's a good cordless mouse that works on shiny desks, and you'll probably love it from the get-go.
Comments
Originally posted by Splinemodel
1. The Scroll wheel on the 1000 has a very cheap feeling button. I had grown accustomed to pressing it as a middle button with the 500, and I had bound command-click to it (see more about this later). This is handy for opening windows in new tabs.
I have no problem with the scroll wheel button. The mouse up and down, as you can admit, is stiff enough to allow use of the wheel button without initiating the mouse up+down (unlike the M$ exloder mice).
Originally posted by Splinemodel
2. The buttons on the 1000 are generally better. The microscopic, round buttons from the previous MX mice are gone. This is an improvement. However, the thumb buttons are useless to me, and the vital application-switcher button was relocated to the thumb area. I find that using the thumb buttons has always been cumbersome. Luckily, I never used the "cruise" features, so I moved some of the buttons around in the setup utility preference pane. This worked fine for me.[/B]
I had a mouse man dual optical previous to this, and I LOVE the thumb buttons on this AND the mouseman. I use all the buttons on my mouse during normal operations on a minute-to-minute basis.
Originally posted by Splinemodel
3. On the topic of the preference pane, it is the same pane for all Logitech mice. Personally, I think it is exceptionally good, and having used the mice on X and XP, I can say that the Mac has the better setup utility. It integrates into the system really nicely, still allowing you to use the system's pref pane for mice and keyboards, and provide MORE functionality than the windows version with none of the bullshit that always seems to accompany windows programs. The one big victory here is that on the mac, a keystroke can be bound to a button along with a click. I have option-click and command-click bound to mouse buttons. This is awesome. On my PC, I was unable to set up a control-click. In my opinion, this is a huge deal.[/B]
Yes, I noticed this as well with windows 2000. It's weird that mac would have more features.
Originally posted by Splinemodel
4. The other side of the coin is that the drivers are better for windows. I needed to use MouseZoom to get the pointer to track at an acceptable speed, as it's native speed is way too fast. It also has some pretty strange acceleration issues, since I have a harder time pinpointing specific targets with it. I like a really low-acceleration mouse. This mouse doesn't seem to use acceleration, which sucks. On windows, this is much more configurable. On both platforms, however, the tracking is excellent. This mouse is exceptionally smooth.[/B]
I had to modify some strange setting on my mac to get acceleration to work properly.
I think it has to do with the lack of loss when moving the mouse--it's so sensitive the acceleration is totally whack.
Originally posted by Splinemodel
5. It is a laser mouse, and is advertised to work on all sorts of laminates that give optical mice the jitters. Generally I have found this to be 100% true. It works great on my shiny desk. The battery seems to last damn near forever, and even so it has a switch on the bottom to turn it off, so that it won't track its laser all around the inside of your bag when you're traveling. On the negative side, it's a bit heavy, but all cordless mice seem to share this dilemma.[/B]
I learned to enjoy the weight--allows me more precision especially in gaming.
The battery life is pretty long, I have to recharge every week or so.
Originally posted by Splinemodel
Final verdict: This is a solid mouse, and it can work quite well in a dual or single OS environment. If you are a CAD user, like I am, you'll realize that the drivers still need some work on the mac side, and the setup still needs some work on the PC side. If you're not, just realize that it's a good cordless mouse that works on shiny desks, and you'll probably love it from the get-go. [/B]
Gaming and photoshop are my main reasons for paying $67 [macmall.com] for this mouse. It's paid for itself in pleasure to use I think.
It's also a strange coincidence that you're a Libertarian. I felt that I had to note that.
do you ever have had the UI and Expose issues discussed in this thread?
I tried 2 or 3 such mice with a Powerbook and they drove the system crazy. It can get so bad, that even a simple trackpad click gives a right click or activates some Expose key. To correct this, you have to logout all users and disconnect the mouse or, in the worst case, reboot the machine.
Kensington told me once that this is due to known and unresolved issues with how the multi-user management system in Panther interacts with multi-button mice. It looks like these issues remain as, even under 10.3.6, I still have them. No wonder why Apple insists in the one-button mouse
I am confused, is it possible to use the mouse when the loading station isn't conected to the computer? In other words is the conection between the mouse and the computer going via the loading station or is there a direct bluetooth conection between the mouse and the computer.
I ask, because I would like to use the mouse with my PBG4 and would rather not take the loading station with me when travelling for a couple of days.
bka77
The compatibility is fine. I have never had an issue with a Logitech mouse.
To answer your question, the MX1000 uses a proprietary wireless technology BETTER than bluetooth, but also INCOMPATIBLE.
It's a hassle, as is the fact that the dock is NOT USB powered (AC -> DC block required).
How is it better? bluetooth refreshes 80x per second, logitech's wireless does 125x per second (as fast as USB). Thus there is as close to zero loss from USB as possible.
as for the acceleration issue, Splinemodel e-mailed me about this and here's what I told him:
I modified this file using pico:
~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist
And I changed com.apple.mouse.scaling like so
<key>com.apple.mouse.scaling</key>
<real>0.38750000000000001</real>
That's as low as I could get it.
After that, I re-logged-in and turned up the sensitivity in the mouse+keyboard preference pane.
I remember it being a bit buggy, if that number above doesn't work (the number will change to something else), keep fooling (change it and re-log-in) with it and eventually you'll run into something usable.
Once I got it to the number above, the results were tremendous, this seemed to have the same accel rate as my old mouse.
here's where I got the idea
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...e+acceleration
I tried that photoshop thing and dock thing and I don't have problems there either.
I use exposé on 2 of the 7 buttons of the mouse and have had no problems.
I didn't have a problem with 10.3.5 either (running .6 now).
Originally posted by PB
Just a question, for you, multi-button mouse users under Panther:
do you ever have had the UI and Expose issues discussed in this thread?
I tried 2 or 3 such mice with a Powerbook and they drove the system crazy. It can get so bad, that even a simple trackpad click gives a right click or activates some Expose key. To correct this, you have to logout all users and disconnect the mouse or, in the worst case, reboot the machine.
Kensington told me once that this is due to known and unresolved issues with how the multi-user management system in Panther interacts with multi-button mice. It looks like these issues remain as, even under 10.3.6, I still have them. No wonder why Apple insists in the one-button mouse
Originally posted by slughead
I read that thread and I've had no such problems.
I tried that photoshop thing and dock thing and I don't have problems there either.
I use exposé on 2 of the 7 buttons of the mouse and have had no problems.
I didn't have a problem with 10.3.5 either (running .6 now).
Thanks slughead for taking the time to read the thread. So, it seems that the problem depends on the Mac model and it is probably due to small hardware differences, as Apple tweaks the assembly lines with time. I have no other explanation. By the way, the Powerbook which gives me such problems, is from the first generation of bluetooth equiped machines from Apple (first generation Aluminum). It is perhaps not surprising that today's bluetooth Macs have improved bluetooth integration with the OS. But you can see the problem even with non-bluetooth multi-button mice.
The article on macosxhints is a good one, but the free PrefPane "MouseZoom" will do the same, and you don't have to poke around in config files.
I have my Mx1000 set to ~0.02. The acceleration is still a bit fast though. I don't see a way to fix that. At this setting, though, the mouse seems to be at its smoothest without being painfully slow. Basically, when I move the mouse really slowly, I want it to track more slowly. I don't know if I can find this option anywhere.
Originally posted by Placebo
I'm still asking for an MX510 for Christmas, I don't want the hassle of a wireless mouse (sounds ironic, does't it)
Is there much of a difference between a 500 and a 510 as far as responsiveness goes?
--B
Originally posted by Splinemodel
I think the only difference is that the 510 comes in a variety of "fun" colors.
Yeah, red and blue, some variety. :roll:
As for the difference, in the MX500 there were slight tracking abberations on certain desk surfaces, as well as some skipping with twitch movements. The MX510 takes away every minor glitch that the MX500 had, as well as adding a button or two and a slightly improved scrollwheel.
I mean, when you're in the $30 pricerange, it's not like anyone would have to debate which to buy.
Vrom various sources:
With the MX500, all eight buttons could not be customized in games. With the release of the bright red MX510, all of the eight buttons were capable of being customized in video games.
The MX engine of the 510 has been updated from the 500 model, though having used both extensively I can't really say that I can explain the difference better than "it's just... smoother". Logitech has upgraded their optical engine to 5.8 megapixels/sec from 4.7 megapixels/sec (from the MX 500 model) and upgraded the acceleration from 10g to 15g.
--B