Macessity, makers of the LowKey stand we covered a while back, has released version 2 of their SlimKey keyboard stand adding a USB hub on the right side. Basically the SlimKey is a steel shelf designed to hide Apple's slim keyboards under your iMac or LCD monitor so as to conserve desk space when you're not typing. The newest version incorporates a 4-port powered USB 2.0 hub on the right rear for a mouse and other USB peripherals. Personally, I find this design rather more aesthetically pleasing than the LowKey which puts the USB hub in front.
The SlimKey V2 is available for pre-order $64.99 and will be shipping on July 21. They also still have the SlimKey version 1 without the USB hub for $39.99.
The neat-freaks among us (myself included) enjoy keeping things in their particular place and order. When making a folder of files, sometimes I want items to fall outside their alphabetical order -- for instance, often I like to have a special folder that's always at the top of a list.
The easiest way to do that is to name your folders with a symbol as the first letter in the file or folder name: like a space, an underscore ( _ ), or a tilde ( ~ ). Mac OS X determines the order of these special characters using your language settings in the International pane in System Preferences.
The names of files and folders in Mac OS X can use almost any character out of thousands of Unicode characters, which include symbols, arrows, and icons as well. There are only two characters you can't use: one is the colon (because it's used by the system). You also can't usually use periods (or full stops) as the first character in a file name (because they're reserved for hidden files).
Also, as far as Mac OS X is concerned, the folder name "AARON" is the same as the folder name "Aaron" (or "aaron" for that matter): this is called case insensitivity. Mac OS X filenames are considered case insensitive.
After the jump, a list of 112 common, easy-to-type characters, and how they're sorted by Mac OS X for English.
Kinesis (from the Greek kinetikos, or "damn you, carpal tunnel syndrome!") have released a Mac addition to their Freestyle line of ergonomic keyboards, which allow users to split the keyboard in half for optimal positioning. This is accomplished via Kinesis' Pivot Tether™ technology, which appears to be, uh, a cable that connects the two halves of the Freestyle.
Kidding aside, this actually looks like a nice solution for those of us whose wrists are ravaged by unfriendly keyboards. I particularly love the big Esc/Force Quit button up on the top left -- clearly the design team at Kinesis has the same build of Firefox I do.
$99 for the Freestyle and $40 each for the Incline and VIP snap-on accessories, which provide a 10 degree slope and wrist supports, respectively.
If you still pine for those, Photojojo has a brand new set of keyboard overlays for Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut Pro, and more for a vast array of recent Apple desktop and laptop keyboards.
They're molded from rubber, washable, and fit your keyboard like a glove. Plus, they keep out the dust and crud that keyboards typically accumulate.
Laptop skins are $30, and desktop skins are $40. Fast shipping options are available, too.
If you're using a keyboard without an eject key, say a non-Apple keyboard, an older Apple keyboard or (in my case) a really old Apple keyboard, you're probably missing that eject button. Sure, you can launch iTunes and select "Eject Disk" from the Controls menu, but there's a much easier way.
Navigate to the CoreServices folder, which lives in your system's Library. There, you'll find "Eject.menu" in the Menu Extras folder. Simply double-click that sucker and presto! An eject button is now in your menu bar.
To remove it, simply click it and drag it onto the desktop while holding down the Command key. You can also re-arrange menu bar items by dragging with the Command key depressed.
If you regularly type on your iPhone with a non-supported language such as Danish, Dutch, Finnish or Portuguese, you'll be pleased to learn about iPhoneDict, a repository of free keyboard dictionaries. The solution is a bit of a hack. After downloading, you have to add the dictionary into the English (UK) slot. This may be a problem if you're actually a British iPhone user. Once downloaded, you activate the keyboard and its dictionary from Settings > International > Keybaords. You can learn more and find step-by-step instructions on the iPhoneDict website.
Today Apple released a keyboard update for both the MacBook and the MacBook Pro notebooks. In regular Apple style, their release notes are not extremely profuse, "This MacBook and MacBook Pro firmware update addresses an issue where the first key press may be ignored if the computer has been sitting idle. It also addresses some other issues."
Please note, this is a firmware upgrade that will install an application in the utilities folder that you will then, in turn, need to open and follow the on-screen instructions. For a list of MacBooks that may need the update, you can look at the Apple support note.
If you computer has been affect by these issues, or if you are just inclined to installing all Apple updates, you can get this update by opening Software Update (Apple Menu > Software Update) or by downloading the installer package from the Apple Support downloads site.
The LowKey Stand looks like a very cool concept, judging from the rendering above. It is a stand that you can perch your iMac or Cinema Display on, and slide your new Apple Keyboard underneath. It doesn't stop there, dear reader! The stand also sports an integrated 4 port USB 2.0 hub so you don't have to go fishing around on the back of your Mac for a port.
The LowKey Stand ships on February 15th, and will cost you $59.99.
According to Apple Insider, Apple has filed a patent for a dynamic, OLED-based keyboard that will allow on-the-fly keyboard layouts via software. Each key would have a matrix of OLEDs (organic light emitting diodes) that display that key's currently configured character.
Not only would this dynamic keyboard design be able to show you the effects of meta keys on standard keys, it would also allow for swappable language configurations. As a user with a bizarre keyboard fetish, I would personally jump all over this, even if it didn't have the Matias Mechanical Keyswitch.
I have a confession: I hate the caps lock key! I mean it's a crazy holdover from typewriter days and for me at least it's always much more of an annoyance than a help. Fortunately, as we covered in an earlier Mac 101, Apple makes it easy to turn the caps lock key off altogether in the Keyboard tab of the Keyboard & Mouse Preference Pane. It looks like they've gone even farther with the new Apple Keyboard.
"Wolf" Rentzsch has discovered an undocumented anti-caps lock function whereby the keyboard will not register a very quick press of the caps lock as sometimes happens by accident when reaching for the left shift key. You can still activate it by pressing and holding the key. Rentzsch notes that if caps lock is already active a quick press will disable it, confirming that this is an intentional feature. He posts a little video to demonstrate.
This is vintage Apple: thinking about and implementing the little things that make your computing life just a little better.
You may recall that one of Apple's slogans when the Mac mini was released was BYOKM-bring your own keyboard and mouse. Well a lot of those keyboards will of course be Windows keyboards, and while they work fine on a Mac, there's one particularly annoying thing. For some reason the keyboard Windows key is mapped to the Mac Command key and the keyboard Alt key is mapped to the Mac Alt or option key. The reason this is a problem is that on a Windows keyboard the Alt key is right next to the spacebar (where the Command key is on a Mac keyboard). So if, like me, your keyboard shortcut muscle memory is to the key next to the spacebar then all your shortcuts get messed up on a Windows keyboard. Fortunately, there's a simple solution to this problem in the Keyboard tab of the Keyboard & Mouse Preference Pane. There if you click on the "Modifier Keys..." button you'll be taken to a dialog where you can easily remap the keys. So to make a Windows keyboard work like a Mac keyboard just change the option key to the command key and the command key to the option key as follows:
When I saw the new Apple keyboards I knew one had to be mine. I'm a huge fan of my MacBook's keyboard, and the new Apple keyboard is a MacBook keyboard you can attach to any number of Macs, what could go wrong?
Once I got my new keyboard in the mail I set it up on my iMac. I downloaded the Keyboard Software Update, restarted the iMac, and plugged in the keyboard. All the special keys worked as they should, with the exception of the Exposé key and the Dashboard key (F3 and F4). Press as much as I would, these keys did nothing. I thought that it might be the iMac, so I repeated the steps on a MacBook Pro and a MacBook with the same results (I also tried using different accounts on those machines, to no avail). Luckily, this isn't a hardware issue since the buttons actually work (I assigned some shortcuts to the F3 and F4 keys to make sure they were actually working) so it would seem the devil is in the software.
TUAW reader shak forwarded a link to this Apple Support Discussion in which several other people are encountering the same problem. Do not be fooled by this discussion's 'Solved' status, as reading through the discussion makes it clear that this problem is being encountered by many folks.
TUAW readers, is anyone else out there seeing this behavior? As I wait for Apple to fix this issue I'll be reading the comments here hoping someone has a solution.
I don't know if you were on the TUAW Talkcast Aftershow with us last Thursday, but if you were, you would have heard a member of the TUAW staff (who shall remain nameless) saying something very forceful about the iPhone keyboard: "Let's face it-- it sucks."
Yes, for all the "oh, it gets better when you learn it" and "you just have to trust it" comments, it seems that the naughty secret lying in the heart of every iPhone owner out there is that iPhone keyboard is not the easiest to type on. And now Science has confirmed it: a new study says the iPhone's keyboard is two times slower than phones with QWERTY keyboards on them. The study examined people (who didn't own iPhones-- more on that in a second) sending fixed length text messages both on their own phones (half QWERTY and half numeric) and on the iPhone, and QWERTY was the fastest. The iPhone keyboard took twice as long (the numeric keypad took about the same time as the iPhone), and participants had more errors on the iPhone than their own phones.
But iPhone stalwarts, worry not, because that "it gets better when you learn it" excuse still holds true-- none of these people were actually "used" to an iPhone. If we really wanted a completely objective idea of iPhone speed vs. QWERTY (or numeric) speed, we'd have to get an iPhone owner to match up against another owner, both experienced with using their phones. How would that pan out?
Oh, and I should put the TUAW staff member's comment in context-- we were talking about the fact that the iPhone doesn't support using an actual Bluetooth keyboard. Compared to the no-button keyboard on the iPhone, it seems our staffer would rather have a full sized QWERTY keyboard hooked up via Bluetooth any day.
Thomas from the German site Rettet die sent us this English version of his petition to save the Open Apple key-- that little Apple icon on the Command key that's missing from the new Apple Keyboards. Already, he's received 1600 German comments in favor of keeping the Apple key, and he asked us to bring the petition to America and join the fight to save the Apple key.
But is it a fight we want to join or not? Sure, the Open Apple key is a tradition by now-- ever since I was a kid, I've learned to use the Open Apple key instead of the Ctrl key on Windows keyboards, and even when Microsoft trotted out their "Windows key" in Windows 95, it was just a copy of the classic-- their flag didn't come close to the icon design of the bitten apple.
But Apple has to have a good reason for taking the key off, don't they? So far, all I've heard is that they did it from a design standpoint-- they didn't want Apple logos all over the place, and the Command key is (and works) exactly the same anyway.
For me, that's not a good enough reason. Having a logo on the Command key is a uniquely Apple standard, and no one said that it cluttered up the keyboard before now. Of course, Apple is Apple, and they'll do what they want-- even 16,000 petition signatures probably won't get them to change their product. But that doesn't change the fact that they're wrong to kill the Open Apple.
Yesterday I took a little trip down to my local Apple Store (the Michigan Ave. store here in Chicago) to check out the Keyboard. That's what Apple is calling their latest engineering marvel-- not the iBoard or the MacBoard, just Keyboard. I got a chance to check out the new iMac, and play with the new iLife apps for a bit, then I cracked open TextEdit and started typing.
So what did I think? I wasn't kidding when I called it an engineering marvel-- the Keyboard is unlike any other keyboard I've seen. It is extremely, almost dangerously thin-- Apple is already making stuff the width of cardboard, and pretty soon they'll move on to paper-thin. It's not actually flexible, but I got the feeling that if I really tried (or just landed a heavy phonebook on it), I could break it in two. Probably not true, but I still felt that way.
But you don't buy a keyboard for its durability-- you buy it to type on, and that's where I ran into problems.
Macessity, makers of the LowKey stand we covered a while back, has released version 2 of their SlimKey keyboard stand adding a USB hub on the right side. Basically the SlimKey is a steel shelf designed to hide Apple's slim keyboards under your iMac or LCD monitor so as to conserve desk space when you're not typing. The newest version incorporates a 4-port powered USB 2.0 hub on the right rear for a mouse and other USB peripherals. Personally, I find this design rather more aesthetically pleasing than the LowKey which puts the USB hub in front.
The neat-freaks among us (myself included) enjoy keeping things in their particular place and order. When making a folder of files, sometimes I want items to fall outside their alphabetical order -- for instance, often I like to have a special folder that's always at the top of a list.
If you're using a keyboard without an eject key, say a non-Apple keyboard, an older Apple keyboard or (in my case) 
Today Apple released a keyboard update for both the MacBook and the MacBook Pro notebooks. In regular Apple style, their release notes are not extremely profuse, "This MacBook and MacBook Pro firmware update addresses an issue where the first key press may be ignored if the computer has been sitting idle. It also addresses some other issues."
According to 
I have a confession: I hate the caps lock key! I mean it's a crazy holdover from typewriter days and for me at least it's always much more of an annoyance than a help. Fortunately, as we covered in an 
I don't know if you were on 
Thomas from the German site Rettet die sent us 
