I recently retired my trusty dual G5 Mac aka “Old Ironsides” in favor of a brand spanking new 27 inch iMac. As I bask and possibly self tan off the glow of this incredible monitor and remind myself to blink as to not burn out my retinas, I can’t believe I’m actually about to type this, but the display isn’t actually my favorite part, I actually expected the display to be cool. I wasn’t expecting the new Magic Mouse to be all that magical, as I have a natural distaste for wizards, magicians, and that other magic spelled with a K.

Before I continue, I feel inclined to mention that according to one of the deleted comments in my last post, I “might possibly be on crack” but I assure you that the Magic Mouse is totally awesome, almost as awesome as crack.

The Magic Mouse looks slick and futuristic like everything else from Apple (unlike crack) and has a nice weight that makes it feel almost natural in your hand or as natural as something manufactured out of metal and shiny plastic can possibly be (unlike a crack pipe). Interacting with the Magic Mouse is more like using a touch screen iPod touch or iPhone, you can click or even right-click without any actual buttons (not sure how that is even possible) zoom the entire screen, effortlessly scroll up/down/left/right and you can even go forward and back in Safari or iPhoto with the swipe of two fingers. Using the Magic Mouse is what I assume being on crack is like, you get to do things that make perfect sense to you but is completely illogical to everyone else, you know the rest of the squares with their normal mice.

And now just like crack, using the Magic Mouse has become addictive to me. Unfortunately the monkey is on my back I can’t get it off and I’m going to be stuck using my old optical mouse when I get to work on Monday with it’s annoying red glow and clunky wheel. But when I get off of work, trust me, I’m going to run right back to my Magic Mouse and like the saying goes “you ain’t catching no crackhead!”

The wheel, a rotating mechanism, is a pattern that appears in many devices used to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital.  They are used to cast our votes, navigate our music players, interact with our cars, and check our email. Wheels have long played an important part in our lives, from steering vehicles to volume adjustment, and designers can leverage their interactive simplicity and cross-cultural established mental models to create intuitive physical user experiences. Stepping beyond the control of one aspect of a system (e.g. volume), wheels are successfully being used for navigating and selecting elements in digital interfaces, but their value is limited to physical manifestation with little to no applicability in pure graphical form.

Examples of wheels in user interfaces