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Dvorak’s new keyboard symphony

Posted by Dan Moren | Thursday, December 28, 2006 8:44 AM PT

MacBook KeysIf you have some time on your hands, and access to a friend or loved one’s MacBook, then it’s time to start planning that April Fool’s Day prank that would make Woz proud. Now, admittedly, this process was originally intended to help, not hurt people, but I think we all know in what direction it’s going.

Flickr user sjwalsh384 decided that he’d rather use the Dvorak keyboard layout (don’t worry—no relationship to Mac troll John of the same name). While in OS X, that’s as easy as popping open the “International” preference pane, clicking over to the Input Menu section and checking off “Dvorak,” it doesn’t fix the fact that your physical keyboard is still laid out in QWERTY format. But I suppose there’s nothing to be done about that short of repainting the keys, or popping each one off and putting it in the correct place. And come on, who’s going to spend their…time…doing…tha—okay, now that’s dedication.

Wow, think of the possibilities. My dream scenario is spelling out messages on a friend’s keyboard, though I’m unfortunately restricted to sentences that contain only one instance of each letter. Maybe I’ll hold myself back to a couple of words. “WATCH OUT!” for example.

Comments (5)

Except "watch out" contains two Ts.

Donn
December 28, 2006
12:46 PM PT

Crap. After all the money I spent on that English degree, I still messed that up. How about "WATCH OU-"

December 28, 2006
12:52 PM PT

Freaky coincidence...
Today is "Dia de los inocentes" in Mexico (Our equivalent to april fools) and I actually changed the keyboard layout in my friend's MacBook (Only in software, I don't have enough time to change the keys...)

Rodrigo H.
December 28, 2006
9:14 PM PT

I was going to comment only to point out the double-T in your example, only to find I was beaten to it. Try using 1337-speak to help find some double letters. You could spell out "w4tch ou7" for example. :)

December 29, 2006
7:38 AM PT

A few spare keys could be fun. For example you could replace the D key with a second S to spell ASS with the added bonus of possibly confusing the user as to which was the real S key.

And swapping the Z and X keys around would cause some confusion as they're used so infrequently.

DarthMac
December 29, 2006
9:01 AM PT

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