New Magic Mouse...meh...with MagicPrefs...Oh My!!!

Santa was kind enough to leave me a new Apple Magic Mouse under the tree this year. Now, I took the Magic Mouse for a test run at our local Apple Store before Christmas and thought it was very well designed, nice to look at and somewhat useful with it’s very limited set of touch commands. What kept me from purchasing on the spot were three things:

1. No middle button – I’m a SketchUp user and that is a requirement
2. Very few gestures – No pinches and touch gestures: that’s just a crime
3. It was too close to Christmas to make any personal purchases for fear Santa was planning on the same purchase

As I said, Santa is one jolly ol’ tech savvy elf and when I unwrapped the gift, I couldn’t wait to try it out on a regular basis; however, I left an old three button USB mouse connected for those CAD moments, that is until I ran into MagicPrefs. Let’s learn a bit more, after the click, about this wonderful piece of free software that gives the Magic Mouse the features Apple left out.



MagicPrefs is a small piece of software by Vladalexa that provides the Magic Mouse with all the capabilities it is lacking out of the box such as:

• Pinch gestures
• 2 finger touches
• 3 finger touches
• 4 finger touches
• Tail dragging – the best named feature in the bunch
• 2 finger swipes
• 3 finger swipes
• and a bunch more

When you download, install and load the software, a menubar item is added (as shown in the image below). This menubar items does a couple of things. First it verifies the software is active and secondly, allows you to open up a Preferences window, select a profile, disable autostart, etc.

Selecting the Preferences option taps into the missing magic; a piece of which is shown in the image below. It is in this window that you tailor preferences to your needs and add capabilities to your mousing, touching, clicking and swiping actions. This is also where you add the all important middle-click if you are three button user like I am.

The thing that really makes this piece of software useful is that you can customize each function to your your own liking and continue to build profiles based on your usage (default, CAD and gaming profiles are included). I’ve customized my profile for my own personal use and continually modify and refine it. I’m beginning to wonder how I am going to be able get any work done on a computer without a Magic Mouse.

If you truly want to experience the magic of the Magic Mouse, you must install this software now. You won’t be sorry and you’ll finally feel as if the Magic Mouse is worth the premium cost. Do you have a Magic Mouse? Have you tried out MagicPrefs? Drop me a comment and add to this note. Would love to hear about your configurations.