I bought the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 the other day. I'm quite fond of Microsoft input devices, I have their USB keyboard / mouse combination at work and at home. I bought the Presenter 8000 because I'm giving a lot of talks and I thought a little presenter mouse would be good. The 8000 operates normally as a 4 button scroll-tilt mouse, but then it also has presenter buttons on the underside.
It's a bluetooth mouse so I thought I would be able to just use my internal bluetooth drivers on my Mac PowerBook G4. Unfortunately while most of Microsoft's mice are totally Mac-compliant, the 8000 doesn't properly register itself as a Bluetooth mouse and you need to hack it somewhat to get the Mac to recognize it. I found the solution on Mac Rumors: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=249841&page=2 in a posting by viper0440 (scroll midway down).
A subsequent issue is that while with the hack, the basic mouse's four buttons are working and the tilt/scroll wheel do all the things they should, I can't get any of its presenter buttons (except the volume control) to work. This is quite disappointing.
I had hopes that SteerMouse would be able to do it, but it doesn't register the reverse keys as mice buttons and the developers say that they would have to write a new driver for it (and they won't). Poops. I'd encourage people to write to the SteerMouse developers asking for Wireless Presenter Mouse 8000 support.
If anyone can come up with other solutions, I'd love to hear about them!
Karen
User Contributions:
| Scruss mentions the ATI Remote Wonder RF, a bit big for me. |  |
It's not blutooth, is big, is ugly, but very cheap (sub $30) and reliable: the AMD/ATI Remote Wonder RF remote. The OS X driver is particularly good, allowing you to reprogram any key to do pretty much anything.
I know it's two years on, Karen, but I've just discovered iRed Lite, which allows you to reprogram the Apple Remote. Nifty: http://www.filewell.com/iRedLite/
Thanks scrus! I've been using Remote Buddy recently instead: http://www.iospirit.com/products/remotebuddy/