Marcin WicharyMar 9

Do we need yet another person crashing out about Apple’s design decisions? Am I doing it only because it’s fashionable to be on Apple Design Hate Train these days? I’ll be honest: I don’t know. But I have been bothered by Apple’s approach to some of its keyboard design for a while.

Even if you don’t care about any of this, it might be a fun visual history of the most tricky of modern modifier keys: the [Fn] key. Hope you like it!

https://aresluna.org/fn

I don’t know what is Apple’s endgame for the Fn/Globe key, and I’m not sure Apple knows either

The origin and the evolution of the most confusing modifier key

Show threadKen KociendaMar 9
@mwichary The globe key 🌐 started innocently enough. It was never meant as a modifier key, at least not by me. After the first iPhone shipped in June 2007, I began work on international keyboard layouts to support the conventions for other languages (e.g. AZERTY for French & QWERTZ for German). There was no hope of using two-fingers—a “modifier” key was unworkable. So, like the shift and .?123 key, we added a new key to switch the layout and the autocorrection language. Hence, the globe key.
Show threadMarcin WicharyMar 9
@kocienda Yeah, I think Globe in the context of the iPhone makes sense because it really is the soft keyboard equivalent to “grab this physical keyboard on your desk and replace it with another one” – something that Macs cannot do owing to limits of time and space of the physical universe.
Show threadMarcin Wichary

@kocienda I understand the complexity emoji add to the mixture since there is really no “physical emoji keyboard” to hark back to.

But Apple shepherded three separate CPU architecture upgrades really well. They should be able to handle complex transitions.

Mar 9 at 5:23pmWeb