Programming with ControllerMate for Mac (and no coding). Part 1 of 14: Introduction.

Note: this is not a substitute for the original most excellent ControllerMate tutorial. I am endeavoring to save some time for those who have read it and now are eager to get things done.

Important: I strongly recommend that for the duration of this adventure you find and connect an extra mouse to your Mac – that way even if you mis-configure your target device you will still have full control.

This is part one in a series of posts. For the full table of contents go here or here.

If you consider yourself a Mac poweruser, you want to dominate your mouse and keyboard. I would not be surprised if you actually invested in one of those fancy mice with a dozen of extra buttons only to discover that the Mac drivers are either under-powered or totally missing (same is often true for the multimedia or gaming keyboards).

No worries.

Reprogram Mac mouse/keyboard/joystick.

A simple application – ControllerMate by Ordered Bytes – will give you the power to totally remap your mouse, keyboard or joystick, offering unprecedented customization options. As a former Windows sufferer I am accustomed to looking for obscure solutions to simple problems, but I have never seen an application with comparable power (within this class). As far as I am concerned, it’s the best $15 I ever spent on a Mac application.

How powerful is it? – with simple drag and drop you can apply complex (or simple) logic, recalibrate your joystick to behave like a keyboard, or even program your mouse for text input via the classic Morse code. Now that totally blew my mind.

Ordered Bytes has a very friendly community of users and good library of examples that will make your life easier and open new possibilities.

I recently fiddled with my own mouse. Apple mice do not agree with my big clumzy hands, so I use an IBM TouchPoint mouse – it comes with no Mac drivers whatsoever.

The success was spectacular, and so I am documenting this adventure as a series of posts – one for each step in the incrementally improving configuration.

Enjoy!