Why Mac's have one mouse button
I'm a PC guy. I probably haven't spent more than 3 hours in my life working on a Mac, so I find the one mouse button thing very strange. No context menus? Shame! I mentioned this in a post yesterday and got a nice reply from Jake (no url). Thought I'd post his reply.
So, the question - Why does a Mac only have one mouse button?
“First, I have to say that the right-click-to-get-a-context-menu convention that has materialized since Windows 98-ish is useful.
That said, the way to get different click behaviors on the Mac has always (geez, since 1985 or so...) been to "chord" with the left hand. On a Mac keyboard, the shift, control, option, and command keys are in a cluster in the lower corner of the keyboard. You shift-click or shift-command-click or option-command-click, etc. Very easy to get used to making combinations of keys with your left while clicking with your right.
And yes, you can chord in Windows, but from keyboard to keyboard the layout of which keys go where (including that new "Windows" key) varies so much that it can be tricky. And also, during the thirteen years between chording the right-click-convention, I was making a bunch of money with Photoshop, MacDraw, and Pagemaker, rarely having to use the menus to do anything...
So, these days, in Win-land, you CAN drink coffee with one hand and do TWO different useful things with your right, but for the times you're not drinking, the Mac-ists can play chords with the left hand and melody with the right. Pretty cool stuff.”