The Magic Mouse has plenty of potential, but unfortunately Apple comes up short, in fact, the Apple Magic Mouse as purchased is very limited.. not much more functional than a basic two button mouse with a tilting mouse wheel. Apple does not deliver the full potential of its multi-touch capabilities.

Fortunately, BetterTouchTool (BTT) brings out the potential of the Magic Mouse, and is free to boot. BTT is based upon and extends an earlier open source application called Multiclutch that added extra flexibility to the multitouch touchpad that Apple has added to its laptops since early 2008.

BTT is flexible when it comes to assigning gestures to actions. You can assign key modifiers with a gestures, choose from a list of predefined actions, or enter a keyboard shortcut. So for example, you could have a gesture of ctrl+three finger click mapped to Expose, shift+three finger click mapped to COMMAND+P. Of course, the keyboard modifier is optional, you could just map a plain three finger click to a action.

The list of available gestures and actions are shown below (click to enlarge). Each gesture can be added on a system wide or application specific basis.

There are options that you can use to configure to stop accidental triggering of gestures, such as:

• length of time until a 2 / 3 finger tap is ignored
• tap pressure
• sensitivity
• ignore portions of the mouse

BBT is at this time, a work in progress, but still very usable and the developer is very responsive to bug reports and feature requests. BBT is definitely a must-have for the Magic Mouse. Download it for free at blog.boastr.net.

Tags: Apple, Magic Mouse, BetterTouchTool