You need to hang up a picture. What do you do?

a) You neighbor tells you you need a stud finder, a self-leveling cross line laser, digital measure, calculator, percussion drill and one or more anchor screws. You have no idea what half of those things are, but you find an online tutorial to learn how to use them and at the end, you make the perfect hook. (1 point)

b) You laugh at your neighbor and use a nail and a hammer. (0 points)

You need to leave your husband/wife a note to remind him/her to pick up your daughter after school. What do you do?

a) You buy a new 12-core Mac Pro, MS Office 2011, Adobe Font Folio and a color laser printer, install everything and take a course in typography. Then you lay out and print the perfectly designed note. (1 point)

b) You use a piece of scrap paper and a pencil. (0 points)

If you got 2 points, then Controller Mate is the right choice for you. Of course, SOMETIMES you actually need all those tools to hang a picture. SOME people, professional designers perhaps, need a fancy computer to produce notes. Most of us don't.

I found Controller Mate absolute overkill, apparently very powerful, but impossible to figure out without studying tutorials, and I'm usually VERY good at the "jump in and wing it" method, even with complicated software. Controller Mate lets you do very complex setups with multi-conditional button assignments, interdependencies, logic gates and math calculations. I may not be imaginative enough, but to me, it seems like a solution in search of a problem. I have a hard time envisioning use cases for most of these things, but I'm sure some hard-core gamers out there or other special-case users will find it a godsend and are willing to go through the extensive tutorial to get it to work.

If you're like me and just need that damn game pad to work, Controller Mate is the definition of "crack a nut with a sledgehammer". I have a Thrustmaster Firestorm Digital 3 gamepad that I wanted to play the Defendoid game from the awesome TV series JPod with. It has a digital D-pad which I wanted to map to the arrow keys. Seems straight-forward enough right? Controller Mate recognized the D-pad as X and Y axis producing values of 0, 128 or 255. To assign keys, you need to convert that somehow into an On/Off signal using math operator "building blocks" that you arrange in a flow-chart type graphical layout. If that sounds like overcomplicating things, it's because it is. I tried various ways going back and forth between tutorial and application and, after about 30 minutes, gave up in frustration.

Installed a different USB driver app and setup was as straight forward as: press button on game pad, press key you want to assign. 2 minutes later I was playing. Kambamthankyoumaam.

Since reviewing this back in 2008, I've switched to "Das Keyboard". Controllermate, Das Keyboard, a Saitech P2900, my Wacom PTZ, and another Logitech MX620 mouse make the most spectacular array of input options ever.

The software remains rock solid after all the intervening OS updates and upgrades and has never interfered with anything else on my system as far as i can tell. It's "Playability" is still excellent. X^D

So cool it deserves ANOTHER 5 star review!

Destroys the competition (USB Overdrive X,SteerMouse, Logitech Control Center)!!!

Super versatile and 0 issues.

thanks:)

An incredibly useful, powerful and, as far as I can tell, mature extension to get the most out of your input devices - if you are willing to spare some time in the beginning. It took me about 1 hour after installation to register this jewel. Never regretted. The only obvious downside lies in feeling quite clumsy and crippled when using a different computer. ;-)

Setting up and configuring devices is suprisingly user-friendly, though at first sight still somewhat complex. CM mostly takes a graphical programming approach with building blocks which can be freely “wired”. Basic stuff like (re-)defining keys, buttons or acceleration comes still quite easy. But CM really starts - and shines - where other drivers I tried before end. And you will need to learn about and explore the different available modules to achieve at more intermediate to advanced configurations. Switchable configs, basic maths and logic, time logic, custom acceleration curves, etc. - it is (nearly) all there. You can even make your gear behave differently depending on active application/context. Nonetheless, the time spend at learning and tweaking pays back well: in terms of convenience, efficiency and, at least in my case, even less muscle strain. (My hands feel less stressed and tired after working long if my input devices are better adapted to me instead the other way round.)

The only thing I would currently like to see added to CM is something like reusable macro blocks or nested structures. Think of e. g. Quartz Composer, which might have been amonst the inspirations for the CM interface, anyway. Macros and examples for some for common configuration tasks should be directly provided with CM. (Something like e. g. a well behaved click-lock is not as trivial to set up as it might seem at first sight.) Further, this might also help to accomodate users who want to have CM “just work” with their device(s) and initially do not want to spend much time at configuration.

Bottom line: if you happen to own some non-standard gear that you want to hook up to your mac or if you would like to highly improve the usefulness of your existing input devices: get this now.

BTW, some equipment manufacturers should better license CM for their gear rather than further distributing their own OS X-challenged drivers. I am looking at you, Logitech.

(Not affiliated with the developer in any way, just extraordinarily satisfied with his product.)

BTW, i've never had the background helper use an even noticeable amount of CPU.

And ControllerMate isn't just to give your mouse more functions. I've given my Cherry keyboard F13, F14, and F15 function keys, corrected the placement of alt/option & command/gui (i know, that's in prefs, also), caused the 'Num Lock' and 'Scroll Lock' LEDs to indicate things applicable to Mac, as well as restoring volume-up, volume-down, mute, and eject as Control+ numlock, keypad-/, keypad-*, and keypad--, respectively!

Simulated Eject responds MUCH faster than the Eject key on my old crud-catching Apple keyboard did.

I was even able to fix 2 problems i sometimes had when gaming with my Logitech MX620 mouse. Sometimes during heated play, when i would press the "Search" button (right next to the left mouse button), i'd accidentally press left-click also.

With ControllerMate, i programmed the two to be incapable of operating simultaneously.

Ditto for left scroll-wheel tilt and right-click. Easy to accidentally press the right mouse button when only intending to click left-tilt. Just programmed them not to function close together.

What other universal gadget driver will allow you to create a keyboard shortcut such as {command(left)-command(right)-option-F}, simulate keystrokes that don't exist on your particular keyboard, enable/disable parts of itself depending on which controllers are present, and what software is running?!

Amazing stuff can be done with this thingamajig! It's actually fun seeing what crazy things you can get it to do, and how it can make different devices interact.

Well worth $15!