Rob Manuel

Photo for illustration purposes only, this ain’t my nasty skanky-ho keyboard

Hi, I’m Rob Manuel and I’ve got a problem with keyboards. A big fucking problem. I can bore for hours on the subject, and so in the small hope that the magic of the internet will get my message to keyboard designers, here’s my rant. Hold onto your hat, it’s going to be a rough ride.

1. Numlock
What is the fucking point of numlock? Why would I ever want to use the numeric keypad as a cursor? Yes I imagine it’s some kind of gay backwards compatibility thing, but it’s just a pain in the arse. The only time I ever press it is by accident and then wonder why the number keys have stopped working.

2. Capslock
Apparently capslock was considered quite useful on typewriters. Probably because TYPING IN CAPS WAS THE ONLY WAY TO DO EMPHASIS. But we have bold now, and the only people who type in caps are the modern green-inkers who send me loony emails about their cats.

Again, it’s a key I press only by accident, normally when filling in a username / password thing, and using tab to change the form focus, missing and end-up adding robmanuelBADGERSEX to the auto-complete. Gah.

Although recently I have found a setting in the control panel to disable the damn thing. Which made me as happy as a pig in shit.

3. Multimedia keys
All those fucking keys at the top of the keyboard. They’re never built like proper keys and always look shoddy and plasticy.

But my problem is more than aesthetics. It’s standardisation. Every last damn keyboard manufacturer has a different idea of what these keys should be doing.

Hence I don’t bother using them as I swap machines a lot between home and offices and don’t want to have conflicting and non-standard keyboard information in my brain. I don’t want to on another PC and automatically stabbing the messenger button, to find it’s opened some shitty sales portal.

And the corporate ego of it all! My old HP keyboard had a internet button that opened the bloody hp.com homepage. What use is that to man or beast? I’ve already bought an HP computer; I don’t need to buy a second.

4. US keyboards
Oh jesus pillocking shit. Who thought it was a good idea to make English and American keyboards different. We speak the same bloody language for gods sake. It’s not like we need a load of twirly umlauts on the keys. The crucial and mind-boggling shit variation is the enter key. On the UK version is nice and large and shaped like an upside down Tetris L brick. The shape is distinctive to the touch and you can easily find it by feel in poor light conditions.

In USA the key is roughly the same shape as the backspace key, with the saved space being used for the backslash / pipe key. Duh, now that’s a brilliant idea isn’t it? Because normal PC operation uses those characters all the time. Probably a hang-over from DOS when your computer was controlled by an arcane series of cryptic symbols. Or small donkeys, I forget now.

5. Colour
Why colour a keyboard cream? Because the manufactures want it to get dirty and you have to buy a new one every three months? Wired magazine once memorably described the gunk as “keyboard plaque”, but the state of some keyboards I’ve seen, it’s more like “keyboard AIDS.” There should be a law that makes all keyboards black. Well, unless you’re a Steve Jobs acolyte and think white keyboards where every bastard button looks like the other is a good idea.

6. Volume control mute
Now, the volume control is one of the few keyboard advancements of recent years that’s a good idea. Using a PC has become a noisy activity, but sometimes you need to answer the phone and being able to quickly hit mute without fiddling with the mouse rocks.

But the small problem is that the mute key often works after the PC is fully booted, meaning that the system “whoosh” noise will play regardless.

Which means using my laptop late at night can wake my family. I’ve taken to keeping an old pair of broken headphones handy so that I can push the jack into the speaker socket and re-route the nasty noises.

7. Sleep button
I’m highly suspicious of the sleep button. In principle it’s great, but I had such a bad experience with the sleep mode crashing the PC and losing my work that I don’t trust it. At least on the recent Microsoft keyboards it’s in the far right corner and difficult to hit by accident. On my old HP keyboard it was place just above the ESC key and I’d hit it when trying to stop a webpage loading, and then go “Argh! My PC is going to die! Don’t die, little computer.”

8. Non-standard insert block
The Microsoft keyboard design team are clearly back on the crack pipe. First they made the insane “natural” keyboard that split the keyboard into two chunks for touch typists. And secondly they’ve recently re-designed the insert block.

Why? All it means is I’m constantly pressing the wrong keys when I try and navigate documents via pagedown and home keys.

I’m sure they did some lovely usability study and worked out it was more efficient or something, but for fucks sake, don’t muck with the standards. I know how to use the old one and don’t want to learn a new one. Haven’t you learnt anything from those crappy Dvorak keyboards that attempted to persuade people to abandon qwerty?

9. Legs
What is the point of giving a keyboard legs? Yes keyboards are more pleasant to type on with a small tilt, so why not simply make the keyboard shaped like a wedge of cheese? It’s a particular sore point for me as I’ve thrown away perfectly good keyboards after accidentally snapping one of the pathetic spindly plastic legs.

10. Function keys
Grr. Another Microsoft “innovation.” On recent keyboards they’ve move the function keys from blocks of four to blocks of three. I can see what they’re trying to achieve here. Visually three is a better shape to help aid the memory: something is either on the left, the middle or the right. However, again this move away from standards results in me pressing the wrong key. For example I regularly press F5 to refresh an internet page, which my brain has hard-wired to know it’s the first key of the second block. Microsoft has moved it to the second key of the second block, hence I now keep keep pressing F4 and wonder why nothing is happening.

… 2 Bonus reasons, there’s no stopping now …

11. F Lock
Oh damn your eyes Microsoft. Is nothing sacred any more? You’re taking my function keys and replacing them with some bollocks about “New, Open and Close”? Ok, the F Lock turns all this off and it stays off which in theory is fine. Except they’ve made the (rather useful for screen grabs) PrtScn key only work whilst F Lock is off. Hence to grab a screen now I have to press three keys instead of one. Nice one, you bunch of keyboard bastards.

12. Wireless
What’s this obsession with making everything wireless? Yes having your laptop connecting to the internet whilst you take a dump in the bog is one of the marvels of the technological age. However we don’t need wireless keyboards on the desktop. I recently was nosing around PC world and except for a shitty £5.00 made of crap thing, that’s all they were selling.

For fucks sake. It’s not an innovation to stick batteries in a keyboard. It’s a pain in the anus. I don’t want to stop typing because my keyboard is out of batteries, it’s just fucking insane.

End bit
Now that I’ve ranted, I really do feel much better. Carry on, as you were. Or why not look on Flickr for some kittens?

UPDATE - Hello to the Digg / Fark readers, and the other blogs linking my rant. BTW: I’ve got a book out, and it’s very rude.