When I first got my MacBook Pro (which I honestly now rarely use–maybe I should sell it?), I ended up using FireFox as my primary browser. The feature I really loved the most and missed whenever working on Windows was its inline search/find feature whenever you hit the equivalent of Ctrl-F on the Mac. Instead of the clunky ancient IE dialog box it added a small strip to the bottom of the browser window and allowed you to search from there. It was really nicely integrated.

Now, I’ve started using an add-in for IE that basically does the same thing. You can get the Inline Search add-in here.

I’ve been wanting a bluetooth mouse for my MacBook Pro for a while now as I’m sick of connecting and disconnecting the dongle (which actually doesn’t “dangle” much at all but you know what I mean) all the time. I first tried Apple’s Mighty Mouse but just couldn’t get used to it. It also made me realize how much I depend on raising the mouse off of the desk/surface when moving the mouse pointer. The problem with it for me was that it actually tracked while raised more than other mice I have used. This ended up making the pointer move in the opposite direction I was trying to move while raised which proved to be too frustrating to me. Meg didn’t have this difficulty with it but we realized she doesn’t do nearly as much raising of the mouse as I do.

I was happy recently to hear about the new Microsoft mouse for notebooks. It’s got a tiny little name: Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. Today, I bought one and immediately tried to get it hooked up. I got a little scared at first as I couldn’t figure out how to get OS X to recognize it and found that the mouse’s product page doesn’t show OS X as a supported OS but it does mention it in some fine-print towards the bottom of the page where it says: “If you are using Mac OS X, the Magnifier enlarges text and images on the entire screen.” This gave me some confidence that it would work and after a bit more searching I came across this post on a macrumors.com forum that has some instructions that did work for me.

So far, it works well overall. It seems like some of the mouse’s functionality isn’t accessible from OS X but it’s the stuff I wasn’t actually interested in for this machine like it’s “presenter” buttons. The button on the left side is currently bringing up Expose which is okay but I’m going to see if I can make it be a “back” button instead. The right button currently doesn’t seem to do anything but I’m hoping I can program it to do something. The scroll wheel seems to be working fine and clicking it works as well. Overall, it seems a little faster than my other mice on this machine and I haven’t changed any of the mouse settings but it seems to work quite well so far.

I just watched this screencast of Parallels (with the new Coherence feature) and was pretty impressed. I think I understand how it works and it really seems like it’s time to try it out on my MacBook Pro. If that works as well as it looks on the video, it means I’ll be getting way more than my browsing/video-editing out of my Mac at home than I have been and that would make the original investment a whole lot more worth it.

I’ll hopefully get some time tomorrow to give it a shot and I’ll probably share my experience afterwards…