Reviews: Apple's big cats play nice with Mighty Mouse. Epson 2200 printer is durable; 2400 should see more of same.In this column I shall give my first impression of how OS X Panther and Tiger play with Apple's Mighty Mouse. But first, a long-term usage report on my existing color managed workflow with the Epson Stylus Pro 2200 ink-jet printer, which should reassure prospective buyers of the Stylus Pro 2400.
Computer reviews mostly describe features, but durability is a legitimate concern for any purchaser. However, durability is hard to anticipate. In many cases, the best predictor for a new model's longevity may be the life cycle of the current model. The newly released Epson 2400 shares the Ultrachrome pigment ink technology of the older 2200, and thus buyers of the new model may look to reports concerning the reliability of its predecessor.
In this context, the steadfastness of my Epson 2200 wide-body ink-jet printer bodes well for Epson's recently launched 2400. I should state that I've been running a 2200 at low volumes for about two years now, exhibiting and occasionally selling art prints, and it's still going strong. In spite of having spent months at a time in the summer switched on without printing, it has survived record heat levels without ever clogging a nozzle—at most four or five cleaning cycles were needed for a clean restart after a prolonged period of inactivity.
Another hint of the durability of Epson's nozzles is given by the stability of the color profiles. When I got the Epson I created custom profiles for all the papers I use, with the help of my Gretag Eyeone Pro spectrophotometer, and these profiles still appear to be valid. In fact, I have just made some black and white matte exhibition prints, and they seem very decently neutral. The new 2400 should of course yield better monochrome gradation as it lays down an additional gray ink.
Various prints from my 2200 that I filed away do not appear to have faded, so the 2200 is indeed suitable as a machine for making salable art prints. Of course, there are limitations associated with Epson's pigment technology—metameric color shift in some light conditions, reduced gamut compared with dye printers—but these are design limitations that Epson is addressing with the new model, and not reliability concerns.
Capsule summary: The technology used in Epson's prosumer printers now seems fully reliable, and in two years I have not encountered fading prints, paper feed problems or clogging issues with the 2200. The printer itself appears to be constructed to endure heavy use and abuse. The print quality continues to be sufficient for my needs as an artist, although I crave being able to afford a larger printer.
Indeed, my only serious complaint about this machine concerns the high running costs created by the tiny cartridges. Alas, with regard to consumable pricing, the 2200 is also doubtless a good predictor of the 2400.
Now let's move on to Apple's Mighty Mouse. I saw some newbred samples in the New York Apple store shortly after the new genus rodent was engineered, but my own new pet arrived only this week. I've been trying it out on my PowerBook with Panther, and on my G5 with Tiger. It would seem that the Mighty is now Apple's standard mouse, starting with the recently released iMac.
Physically, the new mouse looks like the old one, but it has a small rolling ball on top. Actually, the mouse tilts left for the left click, right for the right click, and it has two squeeze buttons, one on each side.
My Panther PowerBook report is simple: Apple's software doesn't install on the old OS, so only the mouse's native features are enabled. You get a left click, a right click, and the 2-D scroll functionality. In Photoshop CS, which is installed on my PowerBook, this translates into a normal click, a contextual menu click-down with the right finger, and the ability to move around an image quickly and easily.
Even in Panther, your life will definitely be easier with this new rodent if you're a Photoshop user, but Apple's decision to ignore existing Panther users is shortsighted: Stable production machines are often left as they stand for years at a time, from the software point of view, but they are still a legitimate hardware add-on market. Windows mice usually come with drivers for an older OS.
Next Page: The Mighty Mouse roars.
Under Tiger, the Mighty Mouse really roars. The supplied CD installs a new panel in the Keyboard and Mouse preferences. Here the user can configure each button with a pull-down menu. At this point I realized that the Mighty is really a four-button mouse: The left and right clicks are obvious, but there's also a center click that you get if you mash down the scroll wheel. And the left and right buttons are supposed to be triggered with a bilateral squeezing action, and thus correspond to a single action.
The various buttons can be allocated to invoke the Dashboard, Exposé, Application Switcher, Spotlight or any other application installed on your Mac. In practice, however, this usage is not really well-integrated. If you invoke Dashboard functionality, then clicking will show you your widget collection. However, as soon as you release the mouse, the widgets zoom back into the background. If there's a way to immediately interact with them I haven't found it.
More annoyingly, when invoked with a click, Application Switcher's row of icons will appear in the middle of the screen rather than under the cursor's current position. This violates the basic principle of the Xerox pop-up menu idea: A pop-up should appear always straight under the cursor so that minimal wrist movement is then needed to make a selection.
There's hope, though, that the Mighty Mouse will soon learn new tricks with the help of third-party software for the Mac. The ability to assign any application to a button extends to Applescripts, which implies easy user customization. Furthermore, it stands to reason that if Wacom can provide application-specific button functions for its tablets, then some third-party programmer will be able to add the same functionality to the Mighty Mouse—I just wish Apple had provided this ability straight out of the box.
The Mighty Mouse is definitely a must-buy accessory for any Mac. Cupertino has finally caught up with the multibutton mouse pioneered by the Xerox Alto 30 years ago and has even innovated with the 2-D scroll ball. But more time is needed for the Big Cat menagerie to digest the user interface improvements that several buttons can facilitate.
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