A new keyboard…

Recently I notcied that my wrists were in pain when typing, this generaly points to RSI. So instead of screwing my wrists some more I decided to go get an ergonomic keyboard. My boyfriend has one and I liked it a lot, unfortunately, Logitech drivers for Mac OS are quite the disaster. So after some searching I ended up with the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000

Now shoot me for using a Microsoft keyboard on a Mac but if you get right down to it… Microsoft hardware isn’t half bad as long as it doesn’t run Microsoft software. I have a Microsoft SideWinder Joystick and Stearingwheel I am extremely happy with and this keyboard fits in the line two. Furthermore, Microsoft provides excellent drivers for usage of this keyboard with a Mac.

The keyboard consists of 3 Launchbutton on the top which I have configured as Camino, Spotlight and Mail, then come five buttons you can bind other applications to, I added iTerm, iTunes, Parallels, Word and Activity Monitor to the list. The come te volume control buttons and a button that launches the Calculator found in Applications. Then there is a another button called My Favourites. Pressing it brings up the screen where you can configure the five buttons. The rest if the keyboard works lke just any keyboard. When F-lock is enabled F1 until F12 act as you’d expect them to, just like the Apple keyboard and PrtScrn ScrLk and the Pause butoons become F13 to F15. When F-lock is disabled you can use those keys to do all sorts of things, all the actions are precofigured but you can reassign them. I for example change the New (which was binded to Command+n) to Command+t so that it opens new tabs instead of Windows. Now there also is a NumPad and a NumLock key. Pressing NumLock won’t do anything, the keyboard is locked in numerics and for Excek users, a few edxtra buttons such as the “=”, brackets and a backspace have been added above the NumPad. Then there still are the Back and Forth buttons which do what you’d expect them to do. In a browser they do the same things as hitting the back and forward buttons and in other applications they allow you to cycle through application windows. The only thing that really is buggy is ze “zoom” wheel. It doesn’t work in many apps and it doesn’t work the same way either. For example, in Safari it will increase the font size (the same thing that Command+shift++ does) where as in Word it will use OSX’s built-in Zoom-function.

Nevertheless, I am very hapy with this keyboard and can recommend it to any Mac, Windows or Linux user looking for an ergonomic keyboard. If Microsoft just dropped the production of Windows and would become just a hardware manufacturer I just might become one of their biggest fans