[dfs]

I'll second that. The preceding Apple keyboard had all sorts of nooks and crannies that collected gunk of the sort only a CSI team could love and were impossible to clean. And then covered the top of the keyboard with a transparent top so all this blech could be put on display like a museum exhibit. The Mathias keyboard, otherwise a joy to use (although a very loud joy) copied this design flaw identically (and then refused to honor the warrantee after the accumulated dreck made some keys fail as if their bad design was somehow my fault), and plenty of other keyboards look as if they have similar problems. It seems like Apple's designers finally figured out that cleanliness is indeed next to godliness, and I wish other mfrs' designers would figure out the same thing.

[sprassa]

I use the Aluminum keyboard with my iMac running the latest version of Leopard. I have not had any problems with the keyboard at all. I have hated all previous Mac keyboards because the touch was not what I liked. I type a lot (and have for over 20 years) so am very sensitive to keyboards. The Aluminum keyboard is great for me. Perhaps the difference in user satisfaction has to do with hand position. I notice that many people who type now rest their wrists on the table or platform where their keyboard is. That is not good typing posture and can lead to wrist problems. Your hands should be floating over your keyboard, with only your fingers hitting the keys.

[heisetax]

I had a piece of dirt fall on my keyboard. Then the piece disappeared into the keyboard. I turned the keyboard over & could not dislodge the piece. With no screws to separate the keyboard to uncover all of this dirt I could see that deep cleaning would be all but impossible. But I still like the feel of the keyboard. It is quiet & matches my PowerBook & Intel MacPro very well. This is the first Mac keyboard in 20 years that I have liked.

Bill the TaxMan

[dougoftheabaci]

I found something that annoys me. The keys stain very easily via spaghetti sauce... I would prefer a black version of the keyboard because of this. It's not too much to ask, the MacBook Air and MacBook (black version) both have black keyboards and I would be surprised if the next version of the MacBook Pro doesn't have one as well.

Oh well. Until then? Yay for toothpaste.

[rickcarl]

dougoftheabaci said:

I found something that annoys me. The keys stain very easily via spaghetti sauce...

Gotta love this thread. :D :D :D

[mat_rhein]

Heehehehhee, I can just agree! This thread developed a life of its own! I first considered to change the setting for emailing me every post but eventually simply created a mailbox for the myriads of responses...

on topic: I agree, the key stain very easily due to the slightly rough surface that smoothes out over time ... but with mine just add water, wiping row by row works like a charm and get the intermediate spaces clean as well...

Just for the general direction of the thread, I think some people need this larger traveling distance of the finger to touchv type- I remember my granny having trouble with a normal PC keyboard being used to an old '57 typewriter with about three times the distance...So everyone according to his own spleen I'd say- no need for strong feelings at all...

working with this keyboard still transports a lot of joy for me: efficiency, silent typing, sturdy aluminum surface, good to get used to as a touch typist- I should know, typing a german software layout on an american hardware layout keyboard... looking at the keys is no help there in most of the cases ;-) You always mistype the hard to type letters, while one can BET that exactly this is placed somewhere else on the keyboard if anywhere...

cheers, mat

[gcouger]

Gbally said:
>But if someone comes out with a keyball, I'll take a look at it.
I think a cording keyboard is a better answer. It can be laid out to minimize the stress on the hands. Unlike the current keyboard layout that is designed to slow down tying so early typewriters didn’t jam. Over time several cording keyboards have been tried. They never caught on as learning a new key board is more than most of us are willing to do.
I think it might find a better following if it offered more functions than a key board and could be configured to suit each user. If one was made for a Mac using the MIDI one of the interfaces that are available would be a lot easier to do today as no one would have to write a driver so they could be reprogramed on the fly and the hardware made to suit the user by using an open source or other MIDI USB diver that let the key actions be mapped to what ever you want and using simple switches and a minimal of interference form an on board CPU I think there may be enough of us that are becoming crippled by mice and keyboards to develop a working system.
I think a few switches and maybe a simple CPU will make what every one could want in cording keyboard.
Off the top of my head using 1 key for each little finger and ring finger and 2 or 3 for the index and and middle finger and 4 for each thumb gives a good deal more combinations than an ordinary keyboard if I did the math right. You the 4 fingers with two choices for the index and middle finger give 64 keys with just the four fingers. The alphabet takes 26, numbers 10, punctuation about 20 more and control keys on the key board 26 more for a total of about 72 and two of the keys for the thumb should be shift keys out of habit and to get the shift enter and other combinations needed. One thumb key would need to be a lock for the other thumb key functions that have the option command and control key on it. The other thumb key would have two super shift keys left. One thumb or finger needs to be able to reach a pointing device as well. I hate to be typing and have reach for a mouse or track ball.
I would distribute the characters so most would be typed with the middle and index finger. With 2 keys for each their are 15 combinations with 3 keys for 2 finger and 1 each for two fingers each there are 80. the 0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0 can't be used.
All key states can be used if an enter key is used for each letter. I think it has a place for the severely handicapped. Using only 5 keys with 4 as entry keys using 2 sets of the 16 combinations before pressing the read input key it is possible to have 256 combinations form 5 keys
Keys can be added or removed for each finger fingers and and the output remapped to accommodate hand problems.
With two devices you hold or have strapped to your hands or feet in the case of a double amputee, the position you hold them longer matters. I expect making a separate wireless link to the USB port with Zigbee or Bluetooth would be much easier than trying to use the Macs on board Bluetooth for the prototype. That’s a lot of systems to get working at once on one machine.
Gordon

[nils]

Same thing to me and my MacBookPro 3.1.
After I bought it last December having had a perfectly well functioning MacBook G4 for some years I immediately found that the keyboard was not as it should be. The first letter in new sentences was missing every now and then, the letter 'i' almost always had to be tapped twice or three times and other letters showed a similar behavior.
I called Apple in Denmark, but 'they never had heard of any such problems'. Apparently they did not read discussions forums but many others had the same problem.
A bug fix from Apple in January solved the first problem with the missing start letter.
I complained to Apple Denmark again and they offered me a new keyboard. That one functioned a little better but still today I always have to look for spelling errors caused by missing letters. Now especially the 't' letter is making trouble.

Therefore I do not any longer recommend people to buy MacBook Pros. It is too cumbersome to type on them compared to older models.

[leftj]

i've had the new imac for about three weeks and I like the keyboard just fine. I haven't noticed that I have had to push the keys harder. Maybe that's because I tend to bang the keyboard pretty hard anyway.

[The9th]

All of the members of my focus group (of one) had this to say about the aluminum keybaord:

It's the best computer keyboard I've ever had/used. And my first computer keyboard was on a CDI-Teleterm in like 1972. With maybe one exception, that being the Atex editorial system keyboard I used from 1976 to 1980 at Newsday and from 1980 to 1986 or so at Atex and then Scitex. I can't remember the exact terms, but these were pretty long-throw keys, using (is it possible this is the correct name?) a Hall-effect switch. This, of course, was me coming off years of Royal and Remington and Selectric typewriter keyboards--and even an awful teletype keyboard, where the only way I could get decent thruput on the darned thing (which had a motor-controlled "escapement governor" on it--meaning that you couldn't go faster than whatever the painfully slow speed at which it whirred) was to type and edit my copy on a Smith Corona portable, then just "type-to-transmit" on the teletype. Tapping your foot like a metronome/base-drummer helped, and even whispering "one, two thre four, 1, 2 3 4 1 2 3 4" under one's breath also.

I've had this iMac/aluminium kbd for 1.5 years, approx,, after wearing out two of the "original" iMac keyboards in the transparent plastic shell. (the keystems wore unevenly and began to jam or stick. No amount of graphite, lithium or even chicken grease seemed to help).

Not to say that this doesn't require some getting used to. It requires a lighter touch than the other keyboards. It occurred for me like the adjustment I had to make between a piano keyboard and a harpsichord keyboard, the latter requiring a MUCH lighter touch. When I tried it out first, the owner nearly shouted "GENTLE!! Be gentle!" at me.

So the trick is to barely touch the keytop but let your fingers fly. The reflex when trhing to go faster is to punchc down harder on the keys--and that's a reflex that's hard to unlearn.

The double letters and such, I think are a symptom of too-hard pounding and you're getting a "bounce" effect.

Although I have heard from one soul that she cannot hit the @ key "hard enough" for the char. to be produced on screen. I find it difficult to believe, as the key pressure is generally so much reduced,but there could be a bad switch. I've not observed the phenomenon myself.

I also may have aided my input with my desk arrangement, which is that, because I use a gloss-varnished door for a desk and my forearms tend to stick, April to October, I use an old bathmat/rug (one of those oval tufted things, like a thick towel) or an el-cheapo 24" x 36" throw rug, about .25 inch thick, that I got from Home Depot, to rest forearms and keyboard upon (with a thin rug-anti-skid grid thing beneath that so keybaord and rug don't skid around. Not that I can ty[pe without typos, but when I settle down, I can go faster than I could on any other keyboard, 2 date. I'm ordering my son one after I post this. (was looking for something less than $49, but I probably shouldn't complain. The plastic ones were really cheap, as I recall, something like $20, but it was getting to feel like another free razor, expensive blade, free printer, ink more expensive than Channel #5 perfume/oz., plastic cameras, expensive film & processing paradigm.

So, no lustre lost here.

bw

[rlwinkler]

Fred, I thought the same thing a year ago at this time. Then I went back to school and started a doctoral program where I had to pull 30-50 journal articles per paper. After a while, if the focus is on the same general area, a need arises to be able to relocate the articles quickly. It is more than that though, each time they must be formatted for use in the paper - both in the paper body and cited at the end. These programs basically do it all automatically. The alphabetizing, the formatting etc. Otherwise, using the word processor provides only things like marginating but the specific format info helps tremendously. There is some paper formatting in Word 07 (windows) and I assume in 08 mac but not with all the automation or the archiving of the data. I spent a day trying to decided between Sente or Bookends and went with Sente because the interface was easier for me to work with. It is programs like these that are help to define the very reason people need computers in today's info overload. Otherwise, how will we be sure of what info is out there or, for that matter, what info to believe.

[sajaki]

i refurbished my previous plastic keyboard, because the aluminium keyboard is too hard to use for gaming. the keys are too small, too shallow, and lack the tactile feedback of the plastic keyboard... If anyone has a better gaming keyboard for Mac i'd be interested to know.

[The9th]

Does it bother anyone that the "M" key is actually another "W" key, turned upside down?

At least, in my small world of experience, in a sans serif Roman font, both the N and M letters would have straight verticals, and the only exception would be the W--although that could also sport vertical sides (and look like an upside down M).

Any word/insights on this "anomaly"? Is it just Apple being "unusual" again?

(Anyway, I hope Steve's health improves, whatever Apple does with its user interfaces. He's been the one abiding influential soul in computer land who understands the importance of "presentation," from the very first "bit-mapped monitor" (the Lisa, then the 1984 Macintosh w/ the file-card-sized screen). He understood that even programmers need nice-to-look-at fonts from the get-go, unlike Bill, who confessed to discovering "fonts" only after he discovered the Internet, saying, at one trade show, that the Internet had awakened him to the possibility that people might actually "read from the computer screen."

(My comment to self and myriad others: So, what did he think programmers, writers and editors had been doing with computer screens for the past 13 years?) The distinction was complete for me seeing Bill and Steve in back-to-back keynotes at this publishing tradeshow (ANPA-Tech). Bill came in with hair all afrizzeo, an outfit that discordantly didn't match -- all a distraction one couldn't quite not notice--and I sure as hell am not/was not anything but a jeans-wearing, Birkenstock-flapping soul back in the day who could care less what anyone wore (except for demo dollies, maybe). And Steve followed the next morning with his usual black turtleneck, long-sleeved, black pants or maybe jeans, and within seconds your attention was on the presentation, not the person. The difference between the two cats was quite striking.

I still have somewhere the shell of the first Macintosh, with the signatures of the developers, from Steve on down, etched/molded into the case. Little touches.

(But that stupid dual-use of the Garbage Can--to delete and to eject diskettes--continues to annoy--though now there's an eject Up-Arrow icon that replaces the trash-basket when it's a disk or device you're ejecting/dismounting. First thing my late dad got stopped by when I gave him an old Mac was that: "But you just told me that's how you delete letters you don't want. Won't it delete everything on the disk? I don't want to do that." As Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini tells the tale in his "Tog on Interfaces," I think it is/was, this was a battle he didn't win w/ Steve. .