A few of you may remember my rant about Microsoft’s very un-ultimate keyboard. Well, I recently had to install a bunch of new machines and couldn’t believe my eyes as I started unpacking their keyboards. I mean, I’ve become used to the unnecessary reordering of the Insert/Home/PgUp block like this:
If you look at that picture, you’ll notice this keyboard also features the highly annoying Fn-Lock key that gets on my nerves by going along with the notion that you wouldn’t want to use your F1-F12 keys as such but instead would prefer to have use-free functions like ‘Reply’ and ‘Forward’ on them, which only work within specific applications and completely disregard the fact that most applications already have shortcuts for these functions anyway (like CTRL+R or CTRL+L in this case). However, that is not all, folks, the worst is yet to come. Behold:
WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!? I understand the reasoning behind the ’tilting’ of the Insert/Home/PgUp block which is apparently space savings, but what kind of asinine moron came up with the idea to regroup the Function keys by 3 instead of the normal 4? On a normal keyboard the first F-key group starts with F1 and stops with F4, making it easy to locate the F4 or F5 keys for functions like closing an application (Alt+F4) or refreshing data in a window (F5). On this unspeakable disgrace of a text input device, using such shortcuts becomes a tedious nightmare as you constantly have to rethink the position of the f-ing F-keys before even making an attempt at hitting them! It doesn’t save space, it doesn’t make using the keyboard easier, it is just plain outright annoying the sh*t out of me!
I demand the head of the responsible person on a platter! With ketchup, and extra cheese please!