Rik Myslewski

All hail the humble mouse, lowly foot soldier of the productivity wars, pint-size pointer-pushing pawn in service to mighty King Mac. Your mouse is the only peripheral you caress for hours a day (you only tickle your keyboard), but you may have never thought of replacing the limited Apple Mouse or Magic Mouse that shipped with your Mac or pondered augmenting your 'Book's touchy trackpad.

Mice have come a long way in the 40-plus years since they were invented by inveterate tinkerer Doug Engelbart and his colleague Bill English at the Stanford Research Institute. Wheels and balls have given way to sensitive optical and laser sensors, blocky hand-twisting designs have been replaced by ergonomic contours, many mice have sprouted multiple buttons on their backs and sides, wireless connectivity has freed us from cable tangle, and powerful driver software offers individualized customization. We're in the Golden Age of Rodents.

The original Mac was the first mass-market computer to be networkable right out of the box. A popular saying of the time boasted that LocalTalk ensured that "no Mac is an island."

Today's Gigabit Ethernet is well over 4,000 times faster than LocalTalk, and even faster Ethernet protocols already exist. The 10-Gigabit Ethernet standard was established in 2002, and compliant hardware is readily available--albeit pricey. A standard with both 40-Gbps and 100-GBps modes is on the horizon.

In the beginning--that is, 1984--a Mac could store 400K on a painfully slow 3.5-inch floppy disk. Today, your MobileMe membership provides you with 20GB of combined e-mail and file storage space--that's 50,000 times as much--up in "the cloud," swiftly accessible by Macs and PCs, iPhones, and iPod touches anywhere with a data connection.

Connections

The Mac's first foray into portability wasn't auspicious. At just under 16 pounds, 1989's Macintosh Portable was only about half a pound lighter than the original all-in-one Macs. The only direction to go was up--and, thankfully, Apple went there quickly with only a few missteps. Today it offers a range of laptops, from the MacBook Air to the burly 17-inch MacBook Pro--and the future looks both bright and light.

Apple's laptop line has done a lot of evolving since 1989's Macintosh Portable. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)Compare the 2.75-pound lead-acid battery in the Macintosh Portable to the half-pound lithium-polymer power source in the MacBook Air--an admirable improvement, yes, but even the latest and greatest battery technologies run down and need significant time to recharge. Imagine if when your laptop's battery died you simply squirted some fuel into it, much like you refill your car's gas tank, and then got immediately back to work. That's exactly what you'll do when fuel-cell technology finally comes of age.

Editor's Note: Celebrating the Mac's 25th anniversary means more than just looking back--it also requires us to look ahead to what your computer will be like in the years to come. We now turn our attention to the processors that power your Mac.

Microprocessors are the brains that power computers, and graphics processing units (GPUs) help provide fast, high-quality graphics display. The faster they both are, the happier users tend to be.

Editor's Note: Celebrating the Mac's 25th anniversary means more than just looking back--it also requires us to look ahead to what your computer will be like in the years to come. In this installment, we address potential innovations to interface design.

Ever since Apple introduced the world to the mouse and the window-based graphical user interface in 1984, the company has worked tirelessly to develop a more efficient, yet more powerful, user experience. It's also worked equally hard to protect its user-interface innovations with an unending stream of patent filings.

Working for a living doesn't have to mean living at work. Whether you're balancing a budget in Excel or crafting a high-powered presentation in Keynote, there are plenty of ways to save time and still impress your boss.

Re-create WordPerfect Keyboard Shortcuts

Frankly, there's not a whole heck of a lot to say about Microsoft's small, attractive Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000, other than that it's a competent wireless pointing device with little to move it ahead of other competent wireless pointing devices.

You wouldn't, however, come to that conclusion by reading the blurbs on the 5000's packaging or its Web site, which brag of a thumb-activated Back button "to easily navigate between folders and Web pages" and a scroll wheel--activated "AutoScroll" feature. I never did find out exactly how these worked, however, because after days of failing to get them up and running on different Macs, and after sending multiple emails to various Microsoft reps, I finally discovered that those two features are Windows-only. To make matters worse, you can't use Microsoft's powerful IntelliPoint mouse-customization software to bring them to life--the 5000 isn't compatible with it. Sigh...

The i-rocks RF-7550A 2.4GHz Cordless Optical Mouse is a decent mouse created by a company that doesn't believe in the famous marketing dictum that to keep your customers happy you should "under-promise and over-deliver."

Instead, i-rocks prefers to take the opposite approach.

The Kensington SlimBlade Media Notebook Set is inarguably a stylish group of wireless input devices. Its three-piece matching keyboard, numeric keypad, and scroll-ball mouse would be sleek and attractive additions to any desk. Unfortunately, stylish does not necessarily mean well designed--and in this case, form forgot to follow function.

After you manage to free this set from its difficult-to-open and unnecessarily wasteful packaging--and if your fingers aren't bleeding from the sharp plastic--it's a simple matter to insert the included six AA batteries into the devices, two per unit. Simple, that is, after you've struggled to open the mouse's tight-lidded battery compartment.

I desperately wanted to hate Logitech's V550 Nano Cordless Laser Mouse for Notebooks, but I instead found it to be the best notebook mouse I've ever used.

Why my original prejudice? Well, here's a quick note to Logitech's packaging-design crew: Please modify either your packaging or its how-to-open instructions so that following them to the letter doesn't result in a shard of razor-sharp plastic gouging a good-sized chunk of knuckle meat out of a product reviewer. Got it? Thanks.

As a pint-size piece of hardware, Macally's Pebble Wireless mouse is nothing special. When paired with the company's Input Manager driver software, however, this little guy is definitely worth a second look.

The Pebble Wireless gets the basics right--mostly. Its laser tracking system makes it effective on almost any surface, its 2.4GHz wireless circuitry is resistant to interference, its two ambidextrous buttons and scroll wheel provide just the right amount of resistance, and its 3.5-ounce weight gives it a solid feel. Also, its USB dongle is conveniently tucked away between its two AAA batteries (off-brand, but included), which are accessed by simply swiveling the mouse's top half 180 degrees.