Having recently bought an Apple Mac, I’d begun working my way through tutorials on how to use XCode, Apple’s IDE for iPhone/ iPad development. Coming from a PC, I had a learning curve on how to use some of the basic Mac features. I’m not saying the Mac is better or worse than a PC, just different. It’s always good to learn something new!

One thing that did confuse me for a while was that the tutorials I was following required me to right-click the mouse on certain items to bring up a context menu. Unfortunately this simply didn’t work, I clicked on the right side of the mouse but no menu appeared. My confusion was increased as the mouse I’d bought (for over £30!) didn’t appear to have separate left and right buttons. Eventually I figured out that the mouse was configurable and that I had to enable use of the right mouse button feature as it wasn’t enabled by default. To enable the right mouse, I had to open the System Preferences by clicking on this button:

then navigate to the Mouse preferences under the Hardware section in the preferences. Finally I had to enable the Secondary button for the right mouse button as shown in this picture:

After doing this, I could right-click the mouse and bring up the context menu, just like on a PC.