SPSS and Mighty Mouse
One of the web sites I browsed yesterday expressed surprise that SPSS 11.04 worked on an Intel-based iMac, given how late SPSS usually is to the dance; many of our users had to delay upgrading to Tiger, or even purchasing an upgraded computer, because of how long it took SPSS to issue a patch for Tiger.
So, this morning, I pulled out my sheet of license codes and my 11.04 CD, and installed SPSS. The installation went smoothly, well as smoothly as on older Macs; the license codes we were issued by Yale (and that my Yale contact insists are correct) indicate that our license expires on 4/1/06 rather than 12/1/06, as they should; but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it!).
I was able to run various analyses in the Tutorial, but will need to borrow an actual, large data set from a colleague to see how fast it is.
One thing I noted is that the scroll-wheel on the mouse doesn't work within SPSS. I was forced to click in the scroll-bar. I don't know if this can be fixed with something like USBOverDrive, or whether it has to do with the whole Rosetta vs. native thing. In any case, I haven't noticed it before.
But that brings me to the Mighty Mouse. I really dislike it. I've been using Logitech multi-button mice for a number of years, so I'm used to a decent-sized scroll-wheel. The little dimple on the Mighty Mouse is just too small, and is reminiscent of the obscene dimple used for "mousing" on some Windows laptops. I would have expected, at the very least, that right-clicking would have been enabled by default. It wasn't. I had to get into the Keyboard and Mouse Preference Panel to enable it. No biggie. What's worse is that the little buttons on the side, which it's almost impossible to avoid clicking when you move the mouse, are pre-configured to invoke Expose. So at the least movement of the mouse, the window you're attempting to navigate in escapes from you, and you have to chase it down. You can turn off this behavior using the Preference Panel, but you can't program the buttons to do something more useful. In contrast, the homologous buttons on one of my Logitech mice map the the forward and back buttons on Safari (and, I think, Firefox). Likewise, the scroll-wheel, when pressed rather than scrolled, invokes Dashboard. This isn't as big a nuisance, as I haven't pressed it accidentally, yet.
To be fair, some of this behavior may come from Tiger per se, rather than the Intel architecture. I've noticed some similar problems with the wireless mouse I use with my iBook running Tiger, especially random and inconvenient invocation of Expose, but I haven't tried to reconfigure the buttons. Yet.
So, this morning, I pulled out my sheet of license codes and my 11.04 CD, and installed SPSS. The installation went smoothly, well as smoothly as on older Macs; the license codes we were issued by Yale (and that my Yale contact insists are correct) indicate that our license expires on 4/1/06 rather than 12/1/06, as they should; but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it!).
I was able to run various analyses in the Tutorial, but will need to borrow an actual, large data set from a colleague to see how fast it is.
One thing I noted is that the scroll-wheel on the mouse doesn't work within SPSS. I was forced to click in the scroll-bar. I don't know if this can be fixed with something like USBOverDrive, or whether it has to do with the whole Rosetta vs. native thing. In any case, I haven't noticed it before.
But that brings me to the Mighty Mouse. I really dislike it. I've been using Logitech multi-button mice for a number of years, so I'm used to a decent-sized scroll-wheel. The little dimple on the Mighty Mouse is just too small, and is reminiscent of the obscene dimple used for "mousing" on some Windows laptops. I would have expected, at the very least, that right-clicking would have been enabled by default. It wasn't. I had to get into the Keyboard and Mouse Preference Panel to enable it. No biggie. What's worse is that the little buttons on the side, which it's almost impossible to avoid clicking when you move the mouse, are pre-configured to invoke Expose. So at the least movement of the mouse, the window you're attempting to navigate in escapes from you, and you have to chase it down. You can turn off this behavior using the Preference Panel, but you can't program the buttons to do something more useful. In contrast, the homologous buttons on one of my Logitech mice map the the forward and back buttons on Safari (and, I think, Firefox). Likewise, the scroll-wheel, when pressed rather than scrolled, invokes Dashboard. This isn't as big a nuisance, as I haven't pressed it accidentally, yet.
To be fair, some of this behavior may come from Tiger per se, rather than the Intel architecture. I've noticed some similar problems with the wireless mouse I use with my iBook running Tiger, especially random and inconvenient invocation of Expose, but I haven't tried to reconfigure the buttons. Yet.
posted by Aliceq @ 11:31 AM
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