So at work I use a fancy Macintosh computer. I’ve used Windows for 90% of my computer using life. With this fancy Mac, comes a fancy Apple Magic Mouse. Two years ago when I first started working here I tried to turn on the scrolling function so you can scroll with your finger (like a wheel) but it never worked. The person who used it before me turned off all the “magic” touch features and I was curious and went to System Preferences and found the settings called “Mouse” and turned most of them back on. Except for the one I wanted, the scroll function. I figured it didn’t work for some reason and for two years I have been using the arrow keys to scroll internet pages or manually clicking on and movie the thing on the side of the page up and down like a fucking schleb.
Today the arrow keys stopped working on my keyboard. For scrolling and just moving through type so I restarted my computer and they started working again. My coworker asked why I restarted my computer and I told him my plight with the mouse and the arrow keys. He said I should be able to turn it back on. So I went to mouse settings and there’s only one setting that looks like it would be for scrolling and it’s been on all this time. Frustrated, I dug deeper (Googled) and after finding a bunch of pages that describe how to get to the Mouse settings for dummies.. I finally found a page that explained that I had to go into Accessibility settings…..oK? …. Once there I found a sub section in Accessibility called mouse/trackpad settings but even then the setting for scrolling was kind of hidden under a button down at the bottom called “Mouse Options” that’s literally on a window with fucking mouse options already on it. Fucking Apple man. So I clicked it thinking it’s probably going to take me to the main Mouse settings in System Prefs that I had already seen. But it opened a new window that was just a scrolling speed slider and a check box for scrolling with a pulldown for with or without inertia. It was unchecked. Even tho I figured it was just to turn on inertia or not I checked the box anyway. I went back to a web browser and holy shit … it worked. What kind of fucking ass-backwards bullshit way to turn on a basic function of a mouse Apple? Jesus christ on a corn dog. This setting should have been with the other mouse settings in the main System Prefs/Mouse settings window. Oh and the thing that was actually there that never seemed to change anything. “Scroll Direction: Natural/Unnatural” … that thing makes it so if you’re scrolling your finger up the page goes down, like a normal mouse wheel does. Since I had that thing on all the time when I plugged an old wheel style mouse in the pages seemed to scroll fucking backwards all the time. I just thought that was how stupid Apple did it.
But speaking of stupid apple the scrolling works like a track pad on the top of your mouse so I moves the page up down and side to side, which is kind of annoying if you’re working on a project in Adobe. I don’t want to say that you can’t turn that off yet because I’ve learned my lesson that the settings for this motherfuck could be anywhere.
Happy computering nerds.
