I recently bought Logitech’s G5 Laser mouse. It’s meant to be a gamer mouse but is also great for daily work. The only problem for us OSX users is that Logitech in contrast to most of its devices doesn’t offer drivers. The mouse works just fine out of the box without any proprietary driver, but you can’t reassign buttons. Luckily, there is third party software addressing this issue.
SteerMouse
First I tried SteerMouse from Plentycom-Systems. It’s a solid and stable piece of Software with a fair price of $20. You can easily reassign mouse buttons, fine-tune tracking speed and much more. But there is a major drawback: the mouse sensibility can no longer be changed on the device. Because I like this feature very much, the search went on.
USB Overdrive
The second tool was USB Overdrive by Alessandro Levi Montalcini, also priced at $20. This tool is equally easy to use, offers reassignment of mouse buttons, but without disabling the sensibility adjustments. So that’s the way I go.
Summary
Both tools, SteerMouse and USB Overdrive let you reassign buttons on the Logitech G5. They work equally stable (that’s at least my impression) and cost exactly the same. While SteerMouse has the nicer interface and was updated more recently, USB Overdrive let’s you still change the sensibility on the mouse. So it really depends if you want to use the later feature or not. If so, you have to use USB Overdrive, choose SteerMouse otherwise.
Update: USB Overdrive also works in Snow Leopard, even without updating to version 3.0
