Oy, my aching fingers...
What’s up with the sludge
that PC makers offer today?
I made a New Year’s resolution and it marks a sad moment in my life. I have resolved to not develop emotional attachments to inanimate objects any longer. Living beings are okay, but not things, anymore.
The roots of my frustration can be traced to my tennis career. In the mid-1980s, I was playing tennis tournaments pretty much every weekend. It was not uncommon for me to play six matches in a weekend, and I would purchase new tennis rackets every six months or so. It was expensive, but easy: I called my local Head rep and ordered the Head Director.
For five years, I played tennis with the Head Director. I knew exactly how much it weighed, how it was weighted, how it felt when I would brush up the back of the ball to impart topspin, and how it knifed through the air when hitting a slice. It was practically an extension of my left hand.
No, I’m not done boring you with all of this. Head decided that it needed to retire the Director for no reason other than because it wanted to offer a fresh product. Change for the sake of change. Head kept the Director in circulation for over five years, so it would be hard to find fault with the company’s decision.
But the trend escalated. Soon, all racket manufacturers were regularly evolving their models—first every three years, then every two, and now, every year. Wilson offers its 2002 models and Prince rolls out its summer line. It’s okay for automobile manufacturers do this; you only buy a car once every five or ten years. And it’s okay to practice this in fashion; people want to change their wardrobes. But a tennis racket...that’s different. When I decide that I like a particular tennis racket, I intend to use that model for a long time. I hope to develop a relationship with it; I expect to be able to make semi-annual purchases of that very same racket. I want to feel married to it.
But I can’t. Today, tennis racket manufacturers change their models purely for marketing purposes, and therefore, I do not allow myself to cultivate a relationship with them. I can’t afford to, because next year, I will probably have to play with a different one. If I allow myself to fall in love, my heart will get broken.
My computer’s tennis racket
Tennis rackets are a bit more personal than computers, but the same dynamic exists in the PC industry, and it’s far worse. The only part of the computer that provides a trace of the tactile feedback of a tennis racket is the keyboard, and today’s keyboards are horrible. In fact, they’re worse than horrible.
I just took delivery of one of the fastest computers I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s got gobs of RAM, is slick, lean, reliable, and gorgeous. I love it.
I also hate it. It has the worst keyboard I’ve ever seen. It feels like a sponge, looks worse than a sponge, has no user controls, and looks like it cost about three dollars to manufacture. In terms of user-friendliness, today’s keyboards are at the bottom of the barrel. To a touch-typist and a computer user who prefers keyboard shortcuts to icons and menus, a powerful computer is a worthless pile of trash if it doesn’t have a good keyboard. Would you buy a Mercedes Benz if its steering column had a large plumber’s wrench connected to it instead of a steering wheel? With my new computer and its crummy keyboard, I feel as if I am driving Windows with a wrench.
Here are just a few of the reasons why I hate all new keyboards...
wHERE’S mY cONTROL kEY?? Without question, the
center of my disgust is the positioning of the Ctrl and Caps Lock key.
Who died and left some evil dictator to be president of these two keys?
Who decided that the Ctrl key must live outside of the touch-typing range?
Pressing Ctrl+S to save a drawing used to be easy; so was Ctrl+A for Select
All and Ctrl+P for Print. For years, my left pinky could find Ctrl effortlessly,
but now the key has been relegated to the bottom row of keys, like some
sort of misfit or outcast.
And if that isn’t bad enough, the Caps Lock key has taken over that coveted
position. What the hell do I want with Caps Lock?? Tell the truth now:
When is the last time you intentionally pressed Caps Lock? This is typewriter
hangover at its worst, harkening back to the days when you had to manually
lower the entire key assembly to type capital letters. Caps Lock deserves
to be in keyboard Siberia, up there with Pause and SysReq, and if it were
removed altogether, I would never miss it. But to give it the position
of my beloved Ctrl key—that is a capital computer offense, punishable
by a lifetime of carpal tunnel syndrome.
Press Alt+F10…Yeah, Right... The second offense to my typing sensibilities is the removal of function keys from their original homes along the left side of the keyboard. Alt+F4 used to be such an elegant way to close an application; ditto for Ctrl+F6 to switch windows. Now both require two hands or an arthritis-inducing single-hand contortion. This is not a space issue; notebooks excepted, today’s keyboards continue to have plenty of space to house the function keys along the left side, where they lived happily for many years.
I realize that it might be easier to find and press a function key when it is at the top, but the irony of this whole mess is that most function keys are not pressed by themselves. Most of the time, they are used in conjunction with Shift, Ctrl, or Alt, the very keys to which they used to be neighbors. Most programs don’t offer commands for all the function keys when pressed alone (DRAW is one of the exceptions). As I type this in Word, all 12 function keys have commands associated with their Alt, Ctrl, and Shift states, but F3, F4, F6, and F11 when pressed alone do nothing at all, and F8 and F9 are reserved for some bizarre selection-mode toggle that I never knew about until I first covered this miserable topic a few years back.
Can you spell M-U-S-H? You might like it, but I utterly
loathe that squishy feel of most of the three-dollar keyboards made as
afterthoughts today. I want feedback when I type; I want a nice solid
click. Good luck finding that today...
It Takes All Kinds
Lest I be accused of being a keyboard nazi myself, I should point out that I completely respect alternate points of view (however misguided they may be). You might have some reason to prefer Ctrl at the lower-left; perhaps it’s easier to find for non-touch-typists. And I do acknowledge the visual clarity of positioning the function keys along the top. I recognize that each of us might have our own preferences, and that is precisely my point: Why can’t computer keyboards be more flexible? Why can’t they accommodate our particular habits? Why has our software, with its near-total customizability, evolved so far ahead of our hardware?
•
As for my new and powerful computer, now I love it to pieces, after having connected my nine-year-old keyboard to it. The best keyboard I have ever used—and the one that I will pound on until it dies completely—is the Northgate Ultra. First off, it has a built-in toggle for the Ctrl and Caps Lock positions, and those two keys are the same size, so I can physically switch them to match their functions. It has function keys along the left and the top, and either set can be programmed to be a set of Alt, Ctrl, or Shift function keys. In other words, I can program the top keys to be Alt+F1, Alt+F2, etc, or Ctrl. With my keyboard, switching between two drawings is easy—I press the F6 key at the top and it automatically executes a Ctrl+F6.
This keyboard also has a very solid base and a terrific key-click. So what happened to Northgate? They went bankrupt and no longer make their terrific line of keyboards. Figures... So I troll eBay almost weekly for people selling theirs and I stockpile them.
So down here at the bottom of the column, I can see that I have already blown my New Year’s resolution. I simply cannot run from my emotional attachment to a good keyboard. I’ll play tennis with whatever flavor of the month that Wilson or Prince wants to trot out there. But try as I might, I cannot use today’s keyboards.
Thank goodness I don’t have to. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with eBay...