new Sun type-4 keyboards

[Casey Leedom]

| From: richard%aiai.edinburgh.ac.uk at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk (Richard Tobin)
| X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 301, message 4 of 9
| 
| I agree that the new keyboards are bad.  Of course, *some* people will
| like them.  Why can't Sun offer both?

I wouldn't call them horrible, but I was certainly glad to find an old
type-3 keyboard to trade for my new type-4 keyboard.

I think it's fairly obvious why Sun doesn't want to stock multiple
keyboards.  It makes stocking and all sorts of other business-type things
a lot easier and more cost effective.  My major complaint is that they
just don't seem to have really thought the keyboard out very well and
certainly don't seem to have consulted anyone on the design.

I've heard a few people complain about the feel, but that doesn't bother
me nearly so much as the layout.  The lower left and right areas of the
central keyboard are far too crowded.  For instance, why did they think
that they needed *BOTH* "alt" and "meta" (now labeled with a diamond) keys
on the lower left?  To put both in they were forced to make both keys
small and easy to miss.  If they really felt they had to support PC users,
just tell them that "meta"=="alt" for their PC applications.  Heck, just
put one big key where the two small keys are and label it with the
diamond.  The same could be said of the lower right region: what's
"compose"?  Is this some word processing key?  Come on, context
sensitivity works!  You don't have to use two keys for two different
context dependent actions.

And the labeling on the left function key and right numeric/function key
pads is so visually confused it's almost impossible to see anything
through the clutter.

(sigh) I could go on, but what's the use.  I'm just going to baby this old
type-3 I was able to finagle and hope it lasts until Sun comes out with
the type-5 keyboards in some distant future.  Maybe they'll have figured
out that they should consult users on potential designs by then.  Who
knows, maybe they'll even take the daring step of being the first
manufacturer to downgrade the caps lock key to an off the central pad
position - somewhere on the underside of the keyboard is my preference,
but heck, I'd be pleased if it were anywhere away from where my fingers
accidentally hit it.

Casey