Wichary publishes second essay on Mac keyboard symbol variants
4 Sep 19 1:16 PM · 4d ago · 1 article · 1 post · 2 sources · development 4 of 4
The second part of Wichary's essay examines Apple's Mac keyboards across regional variants. It covers the famous beige PowerBooks for Germany, a unique Canadian variant from the late 1990s-early 2000s with distinct symbols for Ctrl, Alt, Tab, Caps Lock, and Esc, and Japanese JIS keyboards with a pencil symbol on the Control key—all of which are now obsolete but preserved in Unicode.
“I imagine the government exerted some pressure and Apple relented, creating a unique set of keyboards with some really ugly icons.”
Marcin Wichary
Marcin Wichary Designer, typographer, and author
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first by HN Frontpage, 4d ago
What people said 13 voices · verbatim
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I never understood people complaining about "ATM machine": I mean, I get it. Everybody knows what an ATM is and we know it's a machine, so it is redundant.But if I didn't have a japanese keyboard and family living in Japan since 30 years, I wouldn't necessarily know what:"There was also the JIS keyboard"would refer to.While: "There was also the…
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I think back in the day (say the late 80s) it became apparent to those in charge that this new IT thing was going to be very important in the workplace, and that it was going to be important to train up people to operate computers.Given those in charge were probably one finger typists if that, and befuddled by technology, they would collectively…
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I gonna be generous and guess this was upvoted as top post for being maybe possibly midwit-correct, hoho you are so right good sire, reddit-fedora-tip herpdy-derp.But it would not at all be incorrect in American English to say something was "ANSI Standard". Because everyone with more than a few braincells knows the American National Standards…
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From a visual perspective I miss some of those more esoteric symbols, but the current Apple (US) keyboard gets it right. Symbols with text labels for modifiers and clear pictographs for the function keys (though the F3/Mission Control icon is a bit unclear until you click i and the behavior of F5/mic seems unhelpful). I just remember a few too…
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The Copy/Paste thing is kinda funny.If you don't already know Cmd+C and Cmd+V, the keyboard gives you zero clue what they do.I get why Apple didn't add a bunch of extra keys though. At some point you'd just have a keyboard full of random buttons.Still, having a real Delete key on a MacBook would be pretty nice lol.
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The Canadian keyboards are so Canada: supposed to appeal to either English or French users, but just pisses them off. English speakers go for the US layout, and French speakers go for a European layout.I remember some of our early Chromebooks had Canadian keyboards, and students and teachers revolted.
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On the JIS 2003 model, the more traditional Control position is great (it’s how I map my boards) but the Caps Lock positioning is really good too and makes so much sense with how infrequently it’s used. Very little risk of accidentally hitting it. I wonder why more boards haven’t adopted it.
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I always find icons better than text, given that you don't know the exact linguistic background of the user. Thus for me the Canadian keyboard makes more sense than everything. I think the latest keyboards from Apple also go this direction, exchanging text for icons.
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I'm wondering where those Canadian keyboards are used. I live in Canada, have seen plenty of multilingual keyboards, and have seen those symbols perhaps once. Even so I can't be sure it was on a keyboard. I just recognized one of the symbols.
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> There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboardis a particularly humorous instance of
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Aaaah, he's got carriage return and enter mixed up. The whole reason for the symbol being an arrow returning to the beginning of the line, is because it's the return key. I love the Canadian enter symbol, an arrow pointing into a box.
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No amount of drooling over Apple keyboards will make me forget that Apple's designers didn't add keys for basic functions such as Copy and Paste, Undo and Redo.
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I don't think I've ever seen someone do this from both sides of the same abbreviation (eg. Automated ATM Machine) before now, that's quite amusing.
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