I tried SteerMouse for the trial period and although it provided some welcome features, they were mostly features that are free in other products. But, it is missing some really important features that can be found in commercial products, such as the Kensington mouse driver. In particular, although SteerMouse offers a few middle button options that Apple does not offer, those features are rudimentary and certainly don't justify even the lowest purchase price. Also, there are also several free mouse accellerator tools available that do what that part of SteerMouse does. In short, its features are of a level commonly found in freeware or donationware, but are certainly not up to the level of shareware.

Note that I am not opposed to paying a fair price for a good product. I have no problem with paying sizable sums for commercial products like Photoshop, Dreamweaver or MS-Office or lesser sums for shareware products like Amadeus, Wiretap Pro or SpamSieve. I just want the product to be worth what I pay and SteerMouse is not yet worth $20.

The first thing that one notices is that instead of using a real preference panel, their preference panel simply contains only one icon that opens a separate application, when clicked. That's the kind of cheesy thing that I would expect to see in freeware. Somehow, when I see something like that as soon as I open a piece of shareware, it doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling. In this case, that trepidation was born out in the lack of any unique or outstanding features.

The one feature that I have not found in any but the commercial mouse drivers, that would enhance SteerMouse to the level of shareware and justify the $20 charge, is the ability to pupup a menu of customizable keystrokes. For example, on my old Kensington mouse, I could pop up a menu of predetermined keystrokes that would allow me to open a new Safari tab (CMD-T), close a tab (CMD-W) or make Safari text larger (CMD-+) or smaller (CMD-minus). In Entourage, I could use that popup to create a keystroke menu to identify the highlighted email as either spam (CMD-CTRL-S) or good (CMD-CTRL-G) or run any one of several other scripts that were activated by one or more keystrokes.

With such a feature, the center button would become really usefull and such a driver would be worth $20. But, without some such outstanding feature, SteerMouse leaves one wondering what they think is worth even $5, let alone $20. It's a good start, but not up to shareware standards. I'll watch for future releases that may correct these issues. But until then, watch is all that I will do with SteerMouse.