A strange trek it’s been: I was an early adopter of the old Microsoft Natural keyboards, they still rank amongst my favorites, I don’t like how they’ve been changed since. When I saw the skimpy little rectangular that came with the iMacs on Gophur or Rickb’s desk, I instantly disliked them based on look alone.
Apple Keyboard
But when they plonked a Mac on my desk and I actually used the thing, I fell in love. So now, I have one at home :) I had to download “SharpKeys” to configure “option” to behave like alt and “command” to behave like the Windows key but that only took a quick Google and a few seconds.
There’s just enough depth to the keys that you get a sense of tactile feedback but not enough to require you to really “push” the keys. Since I started using the Apple keyboard as my main keyboard at work I started finding that regular keyboards just didn’t release fast enough for me anymore – especially the old shift key. Oddly, I found that I kept typing “TeH” instead of “The” which suggests to me that it’s not a typo as much as PC keyboards not being able to handle how quickly I type the word – otherwise it should come out as “TEh”
And right now, I am seriously looking at one of the new MacBooks…
6 Comments
and your journey to the dark side is almost complete young skywalker . . .
Lol I was about to say welcome to the light side of the force.
Ah so it’s beent eh keyboard all along!!
Anyone who’s ever had to read me ingame chat or emails knows I type teh insted of the 9 out of ten times.
This has realy only started in teh lat few years. In fact I am at the point of thinking it’s a mental issue, or one of my hands just reacts quicker than teh other now. Putting it down to getting older.
Guess now I can blame the keyboard insted. :-)
TEh problem is most likely that your finger holding the shift do not know at which position it us truly released. If you try it with microswitch keyboard (like ancient IBM metalcover ps/2 keyboard) what clicks on buttonDown AND on buttonUp, you will notice what your lil’finger does. Your lil’ is just too slow.
Try pressing those buttons ve-ry slow and notice at which position key-press is detected. If varies between keys, keyboard is quite crappy.
LOL, i learned to type with Spectrum 48, what a masocist…
Lol, I learned to type on a ZX81 :-P And my dad made me run a typing tutor on the Spectrum 16/48 we had (rainbow typing tutor?)
That’s probably a factor in my liking the Apple keyboard: like a laptop its midway between those old non-tactical ZX keyboards where there was no travel and a modern keyboard which use a large amount of travel and a switch to give you tactile feedback.
The Apple keyboard has tactile feedback but requires very little pressure to operate and thus the keys release far more easily reducing the chance of mispress.
It’s actually my old MS keyboards I have the problem on. When I type “The” my finger is actually off the shift key when I press the ‘e’ but, on the MS keyboards I normally use, the unpressed shift key hasn’t climbed past the release point by the time I press h and e. The speed I type “The” is just fast enough to catch a peculiar timing quirk of the way most PC keyboards can internally that it comes out as “TeH” rather than “TEh” if I was actually making a typo.
Infact, now I think about it, these Apple keyboards are reminiscent of those old ZX keyboards, kinda like the spectrum keyboard but instead of being those rubbery-squishy Sinclair keys on the spectrum, they’re rigid, but they only require the same trivial amount of finger pressure to operate, you don’t have to “push” the keys.
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