The Final Touch
Yesterday I bought a new keyboard. The Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000. I will not bore you with a keyboard review, so please bear with me.
Any way, apart from being ergonomic, which is why I bought it, the keyboard has many shortcut keys and enhancements. The most noticeable one is the Zoom Slider placed at the middle of the keyboard. My first reaction to this slider was: “Cool!”. A couple of minutes later I remembered that I rarely need a zoom function in the applications I use.
It took me a couple of minutes more to realize that I can still find the slider useful, if only it could be used for scrolling instead. Until then I’ve always used the Page Up and Page Down or my mouse for scrolling. However, the location of the slider and its feel seemed to be more natural for this purpose.
OK. That should be easy enough. I opened the keyboard’s configuration application and started looking for the desired setting. Now you can probably guess the reason for this post: I didn’t find it. Is it possible that I am the only person in the world who thinks he could use this slider for scrolling?
A two-minute search taught me that I am not the great inventor I thought I am. Many people looked for the exact same option. A couple of minutes more, and I also found a solution. It required me to open an XML file stored in the application’s directory, and edit it manually. The bottom line, I now have a great keyboard with a useful scroll slider as an extra bonus.
The question is, why did I have to go through all this trouble. For a user who doesn’t know what to look for and who doesn’t know how to deal with XML files, this would have been an impossible mission. It’s not like the people who created the software hadn’t thought about the option to change the functionality of the slider. They just kept it stashed away for some unknown reason.
Will this cause people return their new keyboard to the store? Not really. But it does make one feel different regarding the product. Instead of thinking “why didn’t they think of that?” I wish I could have thought “how did they know this is exactly what I need?”. All it would have taken is one more option in the application’s UI.
June 12th, 2006 at 6:42 am
[…] I have, once again, come across evidence that all the universe conspires in my behalf. This morning I’ve been trying out my new Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. It is wooty (that is, I like it). I’m still having trouble typing on it though. Anyhow, it has this little zoom slider in the middle which I had assumed would work as the scroll wheel on the mouse. It does not. Meaning it is pretty much useless. Who zooms so frequently that they need a zoom slider in the middle of their keyboard!? Ridiculous. So then I figured I would find some way to configure the slider so that it would work as a scroll wheel (a far more useful feature). I’m thinking all this as I’m going through my morning reading queue, when all of a sudden I stumble upon this blog post. Woah. “That is a crazy world!” […]
June 22nd, 2006 at 11:23 am
“Will this cause people return their new keyboard to the store? ”
It did for me.
I bought it because I figured, how could they possibly miss this use?
However, I didn’t think to Google for it. I just returned it and got a different keyboard that didn’t have that useless cruft on it.
March 11th, 2007 at 11:08 am
What a bunch of dumbasses! So you hassled to return your keyboard so you don’t have to change the use for the slider in the drivers?!? Way to go layzyboy.