54 MACWORLD DECEMBER 2019
iOSCENTRAL USE A MOUSE WITH AN iPAD OR iPHONETIPS FOR CALIBRATING
YOUR MOUSE
Now for the bad news. You shouldn’t
expect your mouse to work the way it
would when you’re working on a Mac or
PC. You can move the cursor around the
second you plug it in, but the cursor itself
is a big, gray circle that’s meant to mimic a
fingerprint. (The only option to change it is
to make it bigger and change the color to
a variety of equally obnoxious hues.) It’s
not impossible to get the same precision
that you’ll get with a desktop cursor, but it
takes practice.
By default, the circular AssistiveTouch
menu stays on the screen while
AssistiveTouch is active, although you can
move it around the display with your finger.
By default, you also activate the menu for
AssistiveTouch by right-clicking your
mouse. To hide the menu, though, you can
go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch >
AssistiveTouch and untoggle Always Show
Menu. Provided you don’t change the
settings, it will always reappear when you
right-click.
As you can probably tell, there’s a lot
about this setup that takes some getting
used to. For one, if you don’t use the
right-click menu button mentioned above,
you’ll need to use your mouse to mimic
the gestures you use with your finger for
navigation (such as swiping up from the
bottom in order to open Exposé). You can’t
just tap down and select text as you would
with an ordinary mouse; instead, you need
to double-click on a word with the left
mouse button and drag the toggle if you
want to highlight the rest of the selection.
Fortunately, there are a few ways you
can make your mouse experience on the
iPhone or iPad more pleasant. Below,
you’ll find some of my favorites.Adjust the tracking speed
Right out of the gate, I thought the tracking
speed for my mouse was way, way too fast
for my iPhone. If you have the same
problem, you can easily change it by going
to Settings → Accessibility → Touch →
AssistiveTouch and scrolling down to
Tracking Speed. You’ll see a bar there that
you can adjust as needed.Customize the buttons on your
mouse
If you want to customize what your buttons
do on you mouse, you can do so by going
to Settings → Accessibility → Touch →
AssistiveTouch → Pointing Devices and
then selecting your connected mouse.
In the case of the Logitech G502
gaming mouse that I hooked up to an iPad
Pro, these are the default buttons:
> Left click (Single-Tap for selection)
> Right click (open AssistiveTouch menu)
> Middle mouse button (Home
screen) ■