Arrrghhhh!

Published 13 June 05 by Justin French

I’m not exactly blaming Apple here – no doubt that liquid and electronic stuff doesn’t mix, but perhaps they need to build a slightly more resilient keyboard?

The first incident was a definite a case of Beer vs Keyboard, and I’ll admit Steph poured the best part of a whole beer into that one, so it’s no surprise it failed.

But this time, no more than two teaspoons of water landed around the G and H keys, and within 10 seconds, most of the keyboard was useless.

The best I could do was unplug the keyboard, plug the mouse directly into a USB port and click around. It’s surprising how hard things are to accomplish with only a mouse for input.

I quickly made use of the Character Input Pallet for naming of untitled files that needed to be saved and for typing a quick “I killed my keyboard, back when I have a new one” message to the TextDrive staff.

The two things I really missed were the contextual menus (Control-click) and the enter/return key.

You can type anything you like using the input pallet, but you can’t hit return. This makes it (aparently) impossible to use any text input field that doesn’t have it’s own dedicated “go” button. Two examples in Safari are the address/location field, and the Google search field.

Update: Michel Fortin just emailed to tell me about the Keyboard Viewer input option (System Prefs > International > Input Menu), which does have an enter key – this would have made my mouse-only experience much more pleasant. Oh well.

Any web page that has a search field that relies on the user hitting return rather than clicking a submit button is useless. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible to surf the web unless you have the page bookmarked, or can get to the page you want via a bookmark.

The simple answer would be to use the input pallet and Google, but since I have Safari’s built-in search field, I’ve never seen the need to have Google bookmarked anywhere – until now, of course.

Anyway, back to work.