Ben Hines, Ãœber Hero
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in utilities on September 18, 2008 at 9:44 am
Are you fed-up with the little critter being too darned slow? Does it take an age to get from the left to the right of your wide-screen monitor? You need MouseZoom.
This free preference pane was released into the wild soon after Mac OS X arrived in 2001 and thank goodness its developer, Ben Hines, has kept MouseZoom updated. Apple have never made their own mouse driver fast enough so a speed-up utility has always been needed for the Mac. Even in System 7/8/9 the rodent drivers were too slow, Mac OS X didn’t change that for the better.
Download MouseZoom’s 142k file, open the disk image and drop the little file into /library/preferencepanes folder. MouseZoom is then fully installed and working. It has two tabs, Mouse and Trackpad. Each has a slider graduated from zero to ten, with corresponding superlatives describing the speed. We use Ãœber Fast, about half way. Apple’s default maximum is 1.7 which, when you have MouseZoom, feels about the speed of a dozy dormouse.
Ben says that MouseZoom works in exactly the same way as Apple’s mouse preference pane, it isn’t a driver, hack or kernel extension so will cause no problems with the System. It just lets you set higher tracking speeds. We have never had any problems with MouseZoom in the last seven years.
Who he?
As for Ben himself, he is elusive but dedicated detective work has discovered Ben to be a Californian software engineer, currently employed by Sierra Entertainment where he has been working on Wii titles such as The Legend of Spyro. Other programs created by Ben include various fink packages and games-orientated utilities as well as QuickBom, used to view the contents of a .pkg installer file, FineVol an old Control strip for Mac OS 7 and MacBMD.
The latter is Ben’s contribution to a UK-based project to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to the transcribed records.
The Mac has always had unsung heroes such as Ben to support us and make computing so much easier and fun. MouseZoom is a classic “Just Works” which we think should be part of the operating system in the first place.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
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