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Silvereel

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 19, 2010
349
1
I was wondering if there's any way to 'pan' around the screen with a mouse scroll wheel on the Mac? I'm new to this, and I'm using a third party mouse. I'm not sure if I'm doing it wrong, the Mac doesn't support it, or if there's something wrong with my mouse.

For clarity, by pan I mean hold down the mouse wheel, then drag content left or right, like if I'm trying to look at a large image in Safari or editing something in Photoshop. It's really hard to do the later without it, because I'll have to grab the scroll bar and physically move it to accomplish the same thing!
 
Which Mac do you have?

The scroll wheel on a mouse is generally designed to just scroll up and down a page.

Apple's Magic mouse is probably what you want.
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MB829Z/A/apple-magic-mouse?fnode=56

I have one of the new iMacs. I also have a Magic Trackpad, and it lets me accomplish something similar to this, but it's not accurate enough for editing photos. I have a mouse that I more or less like (and paid a fair amount for!), but this is starting to bug me. I just wondered if it was a compatibility issue, since Logitech doesn't list the mouse as being Mac compatible.

If it's just 'different' on the Mac, I'm sure I'll adjust to it soon enough. And just to be clear, what I'm trying to describe is using the mouse wheel to scroll left, right, and up and down. On Windows, I could do this by holding down my middle button and then moving the mouse left or right.

Either way, thanks for trying to help, I still love my Mac :D
 
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