Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
I have an ibook. I use it extensively and find it excellent. It stands by when I shut the lid and restarts flawlessly when I open it. It has 802.11g wireless networking built in, which mostly just works, and with the addition of a few choice bits of software it does pretty much everything I want it to do - extremely well. Oh, and the battery life is still second to none after 2+ years of usage.
So what's my beef? What is the one, single most irritating thing about it that irks me to the point where I'll actually post in my 'rants' section? Answer: The keyboard. It has excellent action, good positioning, a generous space for wrist resting and is ergonomically more than acceptable for a laptop. Again, well done Apple on a fine product.
But why? Why did you have to move the keys about? I know there's lots of standards to choose from, but why can I not get a normal UK layout when I ask for one? The '@' (at) and '"' (quotation marks) are transposed. The '\' (backslash) and '|' (pipe) key is in the wrong place. The '~' (tilde) and '`' (backtick) are in the lower left hand corner of the keyboard with a superfluous '+- / paragraph marker' key occupying the top left. Where is the '#' (hash / pound) key? [Alt] + [3] will get it sometimes, though not under Chicken of the VNC I notice.
I guess I'm partially to blame myself - in my average day's work I use at least 3 separate computers with keyboards and mice attached. Often I use many more, along with various other miscellaneous pieces of kit with some kind of keyboard attached. Consistently, my biggest problem migrating is to the Apple keyboard. My e-mail client, were it capable of thought, could safely assume that anything in the To: line like blah"domain.com should be converted to blah@domain.com. I touch type (very quickly, though not always accurately - my typos are worthy of Eusa...) so I don't really care what legends are on the keys - but is there some method of setting a keymap? Not that I've found... I can disable the [Fn] key, I can swap things like the [CAPS Lock] key and the [Ctrl] key, but thus far I've not found any method of making the Apple UK keyboard work like an actual UK keyboard (except under X11.)
Please - someone rescue me from my fate slightly worse than being taunted by a Knnnnnnniggit! Until I put comments on this blog (coming soon!) feel free to drop me an e-mail at blog@signal2noise.co.uk with a solution if you've found one. Until then, my typing shall remain stunted on this Apple keyboard of moderate doom.
</rant>
posted at: 02:32 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
