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It's time to put your foot down
John Foggitt at SPSL returns us to one of our favourite topics: keyboard design.
He wants the almost useless Caps Lock to be moved to the function key row, or better: "We are all used to using our feet and hands at the same time for driving, so why not make keys such as Shift, Control and Alt into foot switches?
"This would mean that there would never be any need to hold two keys down at the same time and it would make typing easier. It would also eliminate the need for a Caps Lock key because resting a foot on a Shift pedal wouldn't be difficult."
Anyone have a reason why not?
I remember one of those humourous email circulars about helpdesk calls (urban myth?) about a guy that had no experience of a computer and was describing his 'foot pedal' which turned out to be his mouse. I thought the idea of having both hands free for the keyboard was a pretty cool if you could get the hang of it. But it would appear this is nothing new.. see http://www.fentek-ind.com/nh-mouse.htm or http://www.footmouse.com/for a couple of sites... there are others out there too, but I'll leave that for you to research! I just wonder if they have been designed to cope with the sort of extreme environment you can find under the desk (lunch detritis, mouldy bananas etc), or whether they might encourage (smelly?) barefoot use!
Posted by :JAP | July 4, 2008 9:31 AM