"You can't right-click on Macs" and other myths

[marc weber]

I was in a Photoshop class yesterday, and someone actually said, "You can't right-click on Macs." Amazing how resistant old perceptions are to change.

(I took the opportunity to mention how much cooler Photoshop is on a Mac using a Magic Mouse -- especially with its horizontal and vertical touch scrolling.)

[Bear Bibeault]

At least people have stopped saying "Apple is dying".

[Carlo Moore]

You can't right click, but you can still control-click? Which is basically right clicking anyway. :P

[Gregg Bolinger]

It's just silly to say you can or can't "right click". Ok, so if you plug in a 2 button mouse, you can click the right button and it will bring up the context menu. But if we're talking touch pad, there is no such thing as a "right click". There is an action that occurs that is generally associated to a "right click" but that doesn't make it a "right click". Right?

[Bear Bibeault]

I love my Magic Trackpad, where one "right clicks" via a tap with two fingers, or it can be configured with a tap on a corner.

(And yes, Ctrl-click is a "right click" as well.)

[Mark Spritzler]

I click in the right corner myself. Never thought of holding down the CTRL key.

If you hit the Command Key while clicking you get Hyperspace.

Mark

[Maneesh Godbole]

One finger->click/select
Two finger->right click
Four finger->swipe
And if I get bored with this, I can re(configure) the way I want. What else can one ask?

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

My team delivers a lot of graphics-intensive desktop apps with complex user interaction (think 3D modeling, etc). We go out of our way to support Macs, Windows, and Linux. It's actually pretty easy to give Mac users as many mouse gestures as we need (as many as six to eight different kinds of click/drag operations); the hard part is helping new developers understand how to code in such a way that this remains possible. People who have never used a Mac just don't get it, I'm afraid. But you can do an awful lot with that one button!