Disable horizontal scroll on the Magic Mouse

The Magic Mouse is awesome, but some apps are overly sensitive to its horizontal scroll — to the point where it’s kinda unusable. My latest iteration of the Scroll app aims to solve this problem in a simple way.

In the Magic Mouse tab of the Scroll app, you have the ability to

• Disable horizontal scroll
• Disable vertical scroll
• Select an area on the lower area of the Magic Mouse where scrolling will be allowed.

Disable or enable per frontmost application

You can also manage which apps have Magic Mouse horizontal scroll disabled from the app’s menu in the menu bar.

There is some complexity worth noting here: If you have “Disable horizontal scroll” checked in the prefs window, then every single app will have that menu item checked in the menu bar by default. Conversely, if “Disable horizontal scroll” is unchecked in the prefs window, then you can specify only the apps you want to ignore horizontal scroll for in the menu bar. The scroll area defined in the prefs window will still be reflected for apps where horizontal scroll is disabled using the menu bar.

That’s it! I hope it’s a simple tool for a simple task.

There’s also some dramatic changes to the Scroll app for one touch trackpad scrolling over it’s initial version 1, but that’s a topic for another post.

Some background for those interested

By popular demand, I had added a checkbox in my Multitouch app for disabling horizontal scroll a long time ago. This checkbox will remove horizontal scroll entirely for all Apple devices. Having more fine tuned control over horizontal scroll was a feature that I really wanted to add to Multitouch, but it just feels more at home in an app dedicated to scroll functionality.