Well, yes, but she didn’t realize that Apple sets both of the buttons in the slab-like Mighty Mouse to act the same, as the “primary,” or left-click button, by default. “But … but I thought the new Macs we bought you last year came with two-button mice,” she interrupted, perplexed. She couldn’t believe that all these professionals, with high-end computers and an average of a dozen years of layout experience each, were blithely working with a mouse that hadn’t advanced since 1995. Their IT manager was sitting in the back during one of the sessions, doing something on her PC laptop, and her jaw dropped.
Last week, during a series of training sessions at a magazine publisher, only five out of the total 37 designers during the week raised their hand to signal “yes” in response to my question. Whenever I’m teaching InDesign to Mac users, I always ask them early on, “How many of you are using two-button mice?” And except for a few memorable bright spots in my career, the typical response is always depressingly, frustratingly the same: Hardly anyone.
