Friday, January 27, 2006

multiple keyboards - Google Search

multiple keyboards - Google Search
A quick Google search reveals that most people want fewer keyboards rather than more, but after I read this blog post's comments I started thinking about how cool it would be to have more than one keyboard.

Basically, screen-sizes are getting so that you can permanently keep more than one application in the foreground. However, most operating systems only allow one application to have focus at a time. For example, even though you have Word and Excel running side by side on the screen, you can only type into one or the other.

I think it would be cool to be able to have a second keyboard that was tied to a specific application. Right now I have a bunch of iChat windows on the right-hand-side of the monitor. I change focus to write in them, but I'm not changing the screen very much. Because of this, sometimes I get confused about what app I'm really in and hit command L to write a URL in Safari, which accidentally logs me out of AIM in iChat.

I would like an input manager preference pane that lets me designate a second little keyboard just for iChat, so instead of changing focus to that application, I can just type in a quick note on a different physical keyboard.

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