SmoothMouse is not typical software. It does not have a lot in common with desktop applications that you use every day, such as an Internet browser, email client or text editor. I think SmoothMouse can be somewhat described by the word ‘hack’ from geek speak, because we, the developers of SmoothMouse, do things that Apple does not want 3rd party developers to do, to make mouse movement bearable in OS X. We’re facing a lot of challenges because of that. But that’s not all. From time to time we also stumble across bugs in Apple’s APIs. This is another challenge.
To answer the question in the title, you can expect that SmoothMouse will improve your mouse (and trackpad, optionally) responsiveness and offer more control (such as control over acceleration), but it is not a ‘magical’ remedy that you could forget about after installation. In other words, problems still may occur in rare scenarios.
Our major area of concern is games. For example, SmoothMouse does not always work properly when you play a game in windowed mode or when you use two monitors. It will not work properly in games that were ported from Windows using Wine/Cider.
Fixing the remaining issues such as the one I mentioned can be a very tricky task, if even possible. We’re doing our best, but we’ll have to ask early adopters to be patient, respectful and as well take on the responsibility of reporting bugs.
To end on a good note, SmoothMouse performs well in other ‘heavy’ software such as Parallels Desktop, Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, AfterEffects, Ableton Live. It works with almost all mice that Mac OS X is compatible with, and also supports trackpads, which is actually a unique feature (seeing SideTrack is discontinued).
Stay tuned. Discussion on the SmoothMouse Forum.
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Update: SmoothMouse is out.