Ok … so I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Apple Mice. When Apple release a new mouse I always ‘love’ the idea of them but using them has always left me ‘hating’ myself for yet again wasting my money on a sub-standard device and proclaiming ‘why oh why can’t Apple get it right!’

Apple have not fared well with mouses, meeces, mice over the years and who can forget the absolute atrocity that was the first generation iMac mouse … my god that thing stunk! If you weren’t adjusting the thing in your hand to get it to point in the right direction you were treating the unbearable RSI that had developed in your arm within the first 10 seconds of using it.

It’s this point that is my main gripe with Apple Mice. I’ve suffered from RSI over the many years of pixel-pushing I’ve put in and the only way to use a mouse painlessly is to minimise as much as possible the movement required to get your pointer from one corner of the screen to the other. For this reason I’ve always used rather expensive high-resolution mice that I can crank up to a super-fast speed. Mac mice have never been able to match the speed I require so my wrist hardly ever has to lift off the desktop. For anyone suffering from RSI this is my top tip … go into your mouse settings and crank that speed up as fast as it will go. If you have trouble adjusting do it very gradually over a period of a few weeks but aim for the top speed that will result in micro movements of the hand with no need to lift your wrist. You may also need to purchase an expensive mouse with a high-resolution … something with lasers and shit. You might also want to stick to a WIRED solution … yes, forget the wireless option if you need very fine control. I’ve tried Bluetooth mice in the past and they are way to erratic to provide the sensitivity you need.

Which brings me to my MacBook and the fact that I’m actually spending more of my time on the trackpad that I am with a mouse and I don’t mind at all. Multi-touch on my MacBook is like a breath of fresh air and has totally revolutionised the way I use my Mac. In fact I wish I could do more with it. I love the two-finger scrolls and the pinches and stuff but I want to change spaces with swipes for instance or select text with pinches. With this in mind you can understand why I’ve been quite excited (and skeptical) about the release of Apple’s new Magic Mouse. This mouse promises to incorporate some of the great new features of multi-touch into the shell of a mouse without any buttons. Will the multi-touch be programmable and allow me to use the swipe gestures to swap between spaces? Will the sensitivity and speed of the mouse be improved? Will the swiping on the mouse cause RSI as you try to hold the mouse in position while also swiping? Will it run on my Mac running Snow Leopard without a firmware update? If it requires the firmware update is that going to kill my Mac? Hmmm … questions indeed.

Well, it’s just arrived so here are the answers …

So, there you go. Firstly I’m quite disappointed about the left & right click being a normal ‘clicky’ click instead of a ‘tappy’ click … do you know what I mean? I was expecting to be able to just gently touch to the left or right over the mouse surface to get a click but this is not the case. You can click anywhere on the surface of the mouse however but it is an actual ‘click’ lazy fingers!

My other slight gripe is the swipe action. It’s really hard to do while holding the mouse as you’ll see in my video above. I guess time will tell if I find myself using it. I need to test it in PDF docs to see if I can mimic the three-finger swipe functionality on the trackpad for paging. I doubt this will work.

Another thing that you’ll find is now missing from your life is the middle-button on your mouse. It’s now completely gone. I had this setup as a cool shortcut for ’spaces’ so I could quickly manage my desktop. I’ve found a way around this however and here’s a screencast explaining what I did:

Overall though, a nice mouse that fits nicely in your hand, the speed has improved and the tracking seems nice and smooth. Not quite the amazing technology I was expecting but hey, what do you want?!

A Reg review : http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/10/23/review_accessories_apple_mighty_mouse/

Check out the guts of the new Magic Mouse : http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/10/22/ifixit_magic_mouse/

And here’s a history of the Apple Mouse : http://vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/mouse.html

UPDATE: There’s a third-party utility that will give you loads of extra gestures and control over your Magic Mouse … including the elusive tap-click and middle mouse button click. I’ve tried it out and actually I think the tap-click is a bit fiddly on the mouse. It’s fine on the trackpad where you have the entire area to tap onto but on the mouse you have to be specific about where you tap and 50% of the time your taps don’t register. Maybe Apple will get this right later on. We’ll see. Try out the software for yourself for free for 10 days here.

So the big news from the Adobe MAX conference yesterday was the announcement that Flash Player 10.1 will allow Flash Platform developers to create content for a range of other devices including Mobile, NetBooks and Set-top boxes. The new player will include some new multi-touch events to take advantage of this capability on Mobile, MacBook’s and Windows 7 touch-enabled devices. I’ll be looking at these events myself when they release the updated SDK and player and will be sure to post some examples and experiments.

Bigger news came in the form of a spoof ‘MythBusters’ video exploring the ‘myth’ that you can’t produce Flash content for the iPhone. Yes, Adobe will be compiling native iPhone content directly from Flash CS5. There’s no Flash plugin in the browser on the iPhone but the new FP10.1 touch events will work apparently. The compiler technology is way over my head but here’s the press release and some information on labs. It seems that Adobe have snuck a few iPhone apps onto the store in advance and the example I’ve played with, Chroma Circuit, performed very well (and is really addictive).

This got me thinking about the future for apps on the iPhone if Flash peeps all rush off trying to submit their content to the store. For a start Apple are going to be struggling to keep on top of their approval process. Apple is very strict when it comes to the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and the iPhone Dev kit that most devs use to generate UI elements on the iPhone ensure that developers ‘toe the line’ and by and large result in a design consistency that has been part of their success with the device. Now, I know there are already a lot of god awful apps on the iPhone that seem to deviate from the HIG exceedingly but it isn’t just the appearance of an app that is the issue here. Developing apps for the iPhone is a tricky, slippery business. Memory management and proper garbage collection is vital to the performance of the app and without thorough testing and a decent authoring/debugging environment like XCode it’s going to be very difficult indeed to create a decent iPhone app in Flash. So how will we develop decent apps for the iPhone or any of the other devices for that matter?

Well, while everyone was tweeting about the iPhone news I found myself reading through the Mobile dev FAQ’s and noticed this …

Can I use the Flex Framework to create content for the iPhone?

While it is possible to create iPhone content using the desktop Flex Framework, we do not recommend it. The Flex framework is currently optimized for execution in a desktop environment. The performance, UI, and interaction models have not been optimized for mobile devices.

Adobe is working on a mobile Flex Framework, which should be better suited for iPhone development.

What? That last line got me very excited. And then I saw the link.

And here’s a sneak preview!

Flex for mobile devices

Here’s the app they built running on an iPhone :

Interesting bit of trivia is that the codename ‘Slider’ is a joke based on a conversation in which the original Flex framework was compared with a nice juicy burger for developers and so the mobile framework would be a smaller burger … a ’slider’. As a brit … I don’t get it.

So, there’ll be a new lightweight Flex framework that will allow us to produce UI elements and advanced layouts for mobile devices and this framework is currently codenamed ‘Slider’. Now, personally the iPhone thing could be painful but lets not forget about all of the other devices that we can now develop for. A project will need to change state dynamically to fit within a range of screen sizes, layout will be extremely important as people expect their content to adjust to different orientations and the implementation of themes is also going to be huge. The Flex framework is perfect for this type of development and the Spark/FXG partnership is lightweight and flexible.

Reading the FAQ I noticed this …

On what platforms will Slider run?
The initial Slider framework will be optimized to run on high-end smartphones (phones with a processor speed of 400Mhz or more, 128MB of RAM), and will initially target standalone application environments such as Adobe AIR. This matches the category of devices targeted by Flash Player 10.

Reading between the lines here but does this suggest that the AIR runtime will also be available on devices?

UPDATE: This video on Adobe TV talks about how the process of developing the iPhone app is very similar to building an AIR app. So I guess there wont be an AIR runtime for mobile devices.

Building Mobile Applications with Adobe AIR

Some interesting information in that video. Hardware acceleration will be supported via the use of the cacheAsSurface property.

Ted Patrick has a great post on developing iPhone apps with CS5 including source. Check it out.

Here’s a real good cast of the Secret Session from yesterday with Richard Galvan which explores a bit more about the new features of Flash Pro CS5 including the Text framework and support for ligatures and flow.

They’ve added integration between the Flash IDE and Flash Builder so you can launch FB4 from the Flash IDE and setup workflows between the two environments including launching Flash pro to test from FB. This is going to be great for managing assets in Flash while coding in Flash Builder. Code snippets in Flash Pro let non-coders add interactivity too. This will allow large agencies with teams to have their tech dude add all the common code the designers need to build banners for example. Code completion in Flash mimics FB too … finally!

I’m expecting more news today in the second keynote and will update this post. If you are at MAX and see any demos of the Slider framework then please leave me a comment and let me know what you saw and heard.

I’m getting quite into my keyboard shortcuts in Eclipse now and can honestly say that with a bit of effort and perseverance they are well worth taking the time to learn. There are two that aren’t assigned that are very handy to set up should you be inclined. They are the Shift Left & Shift Right commands for indenting your code. At the moment I can write, duplicate, delete & select lines of code with my keyboard but when it comes to indenting the selections I always have to reach out for the mouse. Today I decided enough was enough and I decided to assign these commands to some keys.

Go to the preferences panel in Eclipse and under General / Keys you’ll find a handy editor for assigning keyboard combination’s to common Eclipse commands for all of the perspectives you have loaded. Find the Shift Left & Right commands within the Edit category and then assign them to whatever you want. I have chosen alt-cmd-LEFT or alt-cmd-RIGHT combo as this will work nicely when I’m using alt-up or down to move lines of code around.

Ok, very funny … now the real thing …

I bought a laptop a while back when I started freelancing and at the time I couldn’t afford a MacBook Pro and had been using a PC at Ogilvy anyway so wasn’t that bothered. I’d always been slightly disappointed while authoring in Flash on a mac … it was always a bit sluggish and took an age to publish anything. Recently I’ve been using Eclipse on a G5 and am now kicking myself for not holding out for that MacBook. Eclipse is great and runs effortlessly on a mac. I’ve also ironed out issues I’d had with iPhoto and iMovie and my love affair with my iMac at home was rekindled (don’t get me started on the iPod though).

So … I bought a Sony VAIO from John Lewis … again, stupid and completely impulsive but hey, that’s what visiting John Lewis does to you on a cheerful Sunday afternoon. It has Vista on it … another mistake. It takes an age to boot and then spends another age trying to fix itself and scan for trojans and spyware. I can’t get rid of the ‘Sony VIAO club’ application that insists on opening on start-up … twice. It doesn’t let me have my 2nd display in portrait mode. Basically, I wish I could replace it with a nice new MacBook Pro.

So I phoned John lewis and guess what? They’ll let me trade it in … woohoo!

BUT … I’ll lose 20% of the original cost. If I trade it in I have to buy the MacBook pro from John Lewis and i’ll lose around £260.

It’s so tempting.

While the new iMac is definitely ’sexy’ I can’t help but think that Apple have really missed a trick this time around. It’s not just me that likes my display in portrait mode is it? My iMac at home sits there with a second monitor in portrait mode especially for browsing and email and to be honest that second monitor gets all the love. I have a portrait monitor at work plugged into the laptop as well and again, most of the attention is on it as most of my day-to-day work benefits from this orientation.

Apple should have designed the new iMac so it’s display could be tilted, what’s more … the display could have auto-adjusted … just like the iPhone. I wonder why they never thought of this?