Fixing the Apple Magic Mouse's Spastic Scrolling

Apple introduced the Magic Mouse in fall of 2009; it is a wireless (Bluetooth) mouse with a touchpad-like sensor covering its entire (curved) top surface.

Like most previous mouse products by Apple, many good qualities of the previous mouse were eliminated, and new flaws were added making the new product annoying or even unusable in some cases.

For me, the worst problem is that you can't click the mouse without it thinking I'm trying to scroll. This wreaks havoc with Google Maps and many other websites (whose designers arrogantly repurpose scroll events for some other function, like zooming in and out).

For Google Maps, the worst offender by far, I installed the ScrollMaps extension for Chrome. This is a nice extension that turns the mouse's scrolling into — guess what — scrolling! With it, you can use the Magic Mouse's scrolling to move the map in any direction (north, east, south, west). Zooming with the mouse is still available with ScrollMaps — just hold down the Command key.

For other applications a more forceful solution was needed. I found the following suggestion by Michael, 2011 Oct 28:

Scrolling (in any direction) continues to be an issue with the magic mouse in almost any app that requires user input. The screen is constantly jumping about as windows scrol left, right, up and down.

The problem is that my index finger rests on the mouse. As I move the mouse to position the cursor, the device detects my index finger hitting the surface and concludes incorrectly that I want to scroll.

After nearly 9 months, I finally solved the problem today.

By creating a small dead zone on the mouse surface using some tissue paper and blue painters tape to hold it in place, I have "patched" my magic mouse so that it works the way I want it to. I'm not getting any random scrolling any more maiking a huge improvement in general usage.

The great thing is that the gestures still work. Just use any other part of the mouse that isn't covered by the tissue and tape (about 90% of the mouse in my case) for standard magic mouse gestures.

Now If I could just convince Apple to modify the software to ignore the upper left corner of the mouse I could remove this ugly blue tape.

For me, it required several layers of paper, but I found a thinner solution:

Make a piece of tinfoil that nearly covers the top 25% or so of the mouse, leaving a margin of about 5 millimeters on left, top, and right edges.
Use the type of cloth tape that doesn't leave sticky gunk behind when removed, (it is matte black, and called Gaffer tape in my part of the world). With a pair of scissors, cut out a piece of tape that will cover the tinfoil plus the extra 5 millimeters around the edge.
Put the tinfoil on the back (sticky) side of the tape, then stick the tape on the mouse.
If tape does not adhere to the mouse's polished surface very well, try using two layers of tape, with tinfoil in the middle. The first layer will stick to the mouse better since it has more surface area to stick with.

This page was written in the "embarrassingly readable" markup language RHTF, and was last updated on 2015 Sep 19.

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