Mouse Manager

A basic keyboard is fitted with more than a hundred different buttons, each serving its own purpose. On the other hand, a basic mouse only comes with three buttons, but there are special products that come with even more. For these types of devices, applications like Mouse Manager let you set custom functions to literally trigger at the press of a button.

After a short and uneventful setup process, you're free to see what it's capable of, in case the name doesn't sound convincing or suggestive enough. There's no actual interface to work with other than a compact configuration screen fitted with a few tabs for general settings, as well as profiles.

In order to gain access to anything, you need to check a box and activate all of the application's functions. You can make it run automatically once Windows reaches the desktop. Switching to the profiles tab puts a simple table at your disposal, as well as a few input fields to set up actions.

When no settings need to be configured, the application quietly sits in the system tray. There, you can easily switch between profiles, depending on the type of activity you're performing and controls you need. Sadly, you quickly notice the level of customization and flexibility are not really what you expected to find.

This is because only extra buttons are supported, so if your mouse only has three buttons, the application is of no use to you. Two extra buttons can be configured, but there aren't any type of methods to identify which is which, unless testing them out.

However, the number of buttons is an inconvenience easy to overlook. More frustrating is the shallow variety of customization to apply to buttons. In other words, you can only attribute one single keyboard button to each command, which has a major impact on overall practicality. It would have been useful to be able to combine at least two different keys for each command.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Mouse Manager is a lightweight application with which you can empower extra mouse buttons to trigger keyboard ones. The first impression raises your expectations, but only to get them shattered because of the poor set of features and lack of support for combining different keys, making practicality rather questionable.