Man, remember when pre-Expo speculation leaned toward stuff like iMac screen size, FireWire in iBooks, and what clock speeds various Apple products would increase to when Steve broke the good news? And these days we're all going nuts over the possibility of a new mouse. Well, we admit, it's at least been a nice change of pace for those of us who like to dish the dirt-- sort of like "blah blah blah new iMac blah blah Apple retail stores blah blah blah Apple handheld chuckle snort blah have you heard how Apple's new mouse is optical, wireless, and has no buttons?"

Anyway, those dumpster-diving fiends over at AppleInsider have definitely been the biggest source of juice on Apple's mysterious new input device, and they're continuing their trend with their latest update: more details on the device's rumored support of "multiple button actions." It seems that documentation in recent developmental versions of Mac OS X refer to a couple of new mouse-action API calls: TipSwitch and BarrelSwitch. The former reportedly handles what would be considered a standard "click" of the new mouse (rumored to involve tipping the device forward), while the latter deals with what happens when the user squeezes the sides of the thing. So for those of you who have been clamoring for years for Apple to ship a two-button mouse, you may soon get your wish-- sort of. It's a no-button mouse, after all, but it seems to handle separate events analogous to a left-click and right-click.

Better still, AppleInsider claims that Darwin, the open-source kernel that forms the heart of Mac OS X, actually supports up to 32 mouse buttons in its mouse driver, thus opening the door for extremely sophisticated input actions. So depending on just how Apple builds this new mouse, it sounds like tilting it forward could be a standard click, squeezing it could be a control-click, tilting and squeezing could be a command-click, squeezing while shaking it up and down could eject all removable media, smashing it repeatedly against the wall could invoke Mac OS Help, and clicking two of these mice together while saying "there's no place like home" could load the State of Kansas web page in your browser. Now that's progress.

However, we wouldn't get our hopes up for an Apple mouse that could actually register 32 separate kinds of "clicks." Our own unimpeachable sources reveal that one prototype "UltraInput" mouse in Apple's test lab was configured to bind dozens of Quake commands to complex squeezes, nudges, and finger placements, thus enabling a trained test subject to play the game entirely with a single mouse and no keyboard. Unfortunately, after ten minutes of frenzied deathmatch play, the experiment was unexpectedly interrupted when the subject's carpal tunnel exploded. Back to the drawing board...