Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Keyboard

One of the things that I was worried about in getting a laptop was having used some recently. The keyboards were a problem for me since I had built such a muscle memory geared to the standard 101 key desktop layout. I had liked the keyboards on my old Powerbooks, and my new iBook is actually enjoyable. It seems that the problem I was having with many laptop keyboards was that they would take the editing keys and make some done via a "fn" key with an existing key, but give some of them their own key and then sprinkle them around the edge of the keyboard. This would cause me to always run into them when trying to hit common keys. The Apple laptop keyboards take the approach of just removing keys rather than moving them around. If they want to include certain functions, they put them "under" existing keys using the laptop "fn" key. This really only is the pgup/pgdn and home/end keys and some of the function keys on my iBook. Home/end are under the left/right arrows, and Pgup/Pgdn are under the up/down arrows, which is easy. The result is a simple layout that I can type on so well that I'm having a harder time adjusting to the full size Mac keyboard (Bluetooth model), but to be fair, I've spent very little time with it so far, so we shall see.

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