My friend has a Mighty Mouse and is still with Snow Leopard OS. When he presses the scroll wheel he can get Dashboard right away. I'm trying to get him to switch to a Magic Mouse but he is stuck on that Dashboard-access feature that he has with Mighty Mouse. Wondering if he can do the same thing with a Magic Mouse?
iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)
I do not have a Magic Mouse at home to check out the configuration options, but I know that if he installs BetterTouchTool, there is a show dashboard action that he can associate with any Magic Mouse gesture.
<http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/32953/bettertouchtool>
Personally, I prefer the Magic Trackpad over any mouse, especially when paired with BetterTouchTool. I put my mice away after just one day using the Magic Trackpad with BetterTouchTool.
The Magic Mouse while pretty, slick and fairly functional is completely horrible with batteries and battery life.
If you decide to get this plan on making this purchase as well.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/H4825ZM/B/mobee-magic-charger-for-apple-magic- mouse?fnode=56
Unfortunately the minimum requirement is for OS X 10.7. My friend is an older guy (same age as me - 67) who's not prone to going to newer technology if his older technology is working fine for him. He's cleaned the scroll ball with alcohol before and got it working but not this time. So I guess that either he'll have to go to eBay to try to find a new Mighty Mouse, or he'll have to go with a Magic Mouse and possibly upgrade to 10.7 so he can take advantage of the BetterTouchTool to quickly access his Dashboard. I'll let you know what he decides. In the meantime, thanks for the suggestion(s).
BetterTouchTool for older versions of Mac OS X:
http://blog.boastr.net/downloads-secondbar-bettertouchtool-2/
The last 64bit Snow Leopard (10.6 ) version (v 0.939 ) can be downloaded here
If you are using an older 32bit Mac you’ll have to use this version: 0.785
> My friend is an older guy (same age as me - 67) who's not prone to going to newer technology if his older technology is working fine for him.
I'm no spring chicken either. 67 is not old (or I hope it isn't, as I'm approaching that age like a guy on skates going down a VERY steep hill 😮 ).
Good one! Now he won't have to upgrade his OS. Only one more question: at the BetterTouchTool web site it says that certain gestures are customizable but no indication that he can customize so he can get to Dashboard. Don't suppose you know about that specifically?
I'll have to do that tomorrow when I'm at work, where I have a Magic Mouse (sitting in a drawer, because as I said I like my Magic Trackpad better), and I also happen to be running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, so I can figure out exactly what to setup.
But if you want to play with your own Magic Mouse, I know that Dashboard be launched via a hotkey you can setup in System Preferences, and BetterTouchTool can associate a gesture with a hotkey, so you do the gesture, and BTT issues the hotkey.
I have to actually look on my work Mac as my home Mac is Mavericks and running a newer version of BTT which has a slightly different set of actions and appearance.
Thanks for the help! Although I'm the Mac guru among my peers - having been with it since the early '90's - I'm learning new tricks all the time and some tricks take awhile to understand. For example, I tried setting up a hotkey for Dashboard but - despite the instructions from Apple as to how to do that - I don't understand the part where I'm supposed to Type the menu command for which you want to set a keyboard shortcut in the Menu Title field.
It goes on to say: You must type the command exactly as it appears in the application menu, including ellipses and any other punctuation. An ellipsis is a special character that looks like three periods. To type an ellipsis, press Option-semicolon, or use the Character Viewer. It may be difficult to know whether the command is written in the menu with a real ellipsis or with three periods, so if one does not work, try the other.
For Dashboard there is no application menu so I'm thinking that Dashboard is one of those applications that one can't create a hotkey for. Since it's probably late where you are, I will look forward (hopefully) to hearing from you tomorrow. Thanks again.
P.S. I don't think I'm old but as a first-time dad of twin 2 1/2 y/o boys I'm always being asked questions like "are these your first grandchildren" and I'm resigned to the probability that I won't be around to see them graduate from high school let alone university let alone become world leaders!
This is the BetterTouchTool preferences panel
I've configured a 2 finder double tap on the Magic mouse to bring up Dashboard. This is on my Snow Leopard 10.6.8 iMac at work.
This is a list of all the Magic Mouse Gestures BTT offers
This is a list of all the Predefined Action that can be associated with a Gesture
You can also associate a Gesture with a hotkey combination
BTT can also define new Hotkeys (shortcuts), and it is much easier that the Mac OS X System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard shortcuts. Much easier.
can Magic Mouse access Dashboard like Mighty Mouse?
