All Logitech Mac drivers silently install Unsanity hacks

All Logitech Mac drivers silently install Unsanity hacks

I stumbled upon this today when I was trying to figure out why my new Logitech mouse’s tilt-scrolling functionality wasn’t working, and nearly had an aneurism.

Unsanity’s Application Enhancer is a hack (by their own admission) that ties into the OS and makes all kinds of strange changes to it that can cause complicated problems. Apple automatically disregards any bug reports sent to them from systems with Application Enhancer installed.

There’s a debate among developers and users about whether these hacks are ‘worth it’. I myself tend to lean more towards the ‘no, a few cheap tricks aren’t worth compromising the system’s stability and integrity’ side. Needless to say, I had no idea that I was already running it.

That Logitech for some reason feels it’s necessary to install this mess just for basic functionality of its products speaks volumes to the quality (or lack thereof) of their software. I will never buy from them again.

Even worse, running the Logitech uninstaller doesn’t get rid of the Unsanity junk that it put there in the first place. I had to download Unsanity’s installer (which cheerfully confirmed that I was already running version 2.0.2) in order to uninstall Application Enhancer.

Although most of the mouse’s functionality works fine on Mac OS X without any drivers at all (all three buttons, and vertical scrolling), the horizontal tilt-scrolling does not. Alternatives suggested in the linked thread are USB Overdrive and SteerMouse; neither of which, unfortunately, are free.