Mac Forum / Programming / Mac Programming / January 2006

when i upgraded from macosx 10.3 to 10.4, the scroll wheel on my mouse started
acting differently.  now it apparently takes acceleration into account, so a
small spin produces small thumb movement, while a big spin produces fast
movement.  pretty much the only thing i use the scroll wheel for is small
movements through large screen-fulls of text, so i end up having to spin the
scroll wheel a *lot* more than i used to.  i don't like it, and the mouse
prefs provide no way to change it.

for awhile i used this to help rectify the problem:

 http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/

but wow, what a lousy app *that* thing is.  the windows are ugly, the text is
in engrish, i never have a very good idea of what i'm adjusting, they almost
always choose the wrong controls, ick ick ick.  i'm not averse to paying for
software i use, but only if it's good.

i don't suppose it's possible to call some carbon or cocoa function to change
the mouse scroll wheel acceleration profile?  i can't seem to google up the
appropriate api methods to call, if they exist.  maybe they don't, because it
looks like the steermouse guys wrote their own replacement mouse driver.