Tag: KEYBOARD

The Android 2.3 SDK has just been rolled out -- and that means it's time for the hacking to commence! The crew at Droid Life has already backported one big chunk of the Gingerbread release to a Froyo device: the improved on-screen keyboard. Certain functionality is missing at this point -- most notably auto-complete -- so it may be worth holding off for a more polished release before ...

If you're a fan of life hacks of any kind and you can't touch-type, you're wasting your time. Just like the best current upgrade you can give your computer in terms of overall speed improvement is a solid-state drive, the best overall speed improvement you can give yourself when it comes to the time you spend on a computer is the ability to touch-type. I'm not kidding, and if you're skeptical I ...

Key Hero is an online typing test implemented in Flash. It's very, very good, and very addictive. You'll be given an assortment of texts -- all from known books or films, and all quite nice to read. You hit Start, and it then waits for your first keystroke. Once you start typing, the timer kicks in. When you make a mistake, it beeps and turns red. You fix it, and continue. At the end your overall ...

Like to spend as little time as possible mousing around your desktop? Windows has a built-in feature called Mouse Keys which lets you move your pointer by using the numeric keypad, but not every keyboard has one. If you're using a netbook or laptop without a number pad and you like the sound of Mouse Keys, check out MouseFIGHTER. It's a free program which lets you use the arrow keys to navigate ...

Keyboard Leds is a simple, freeware application that does one thing: it adds an icon with a tiny three-square grid to your system tray, and that icon reflects the status of your keyboard LEDs. So, if you turn Caps Lock on, the middle "LED" turns white. Scroll Lock is the right one (and in case you're wondering, it still does stuff, especially in Excel), and Num Lock is the leftmost square. It's ...

Using a well-documented and easily-replicated flaw in the USB specification, a bunch of plucky Canadians have managed to turn innocuous peripherals like keyboards into a hardware trojan horse. The team produced a modified keyboard that was capable of transmitting data in Morse code, using an LED -- but that was just a proof of concept! There's nothing to prevent a keyboard from sending data ...

Before Windows 7 came out, I used to love Launchy. I'm a keyboard-centric kind of guy, and a keyboard launcher fits in perfectly with my workflow. Launchy wasn't the only app I tried; I think I went through just about every major keyboard launcher for Windows and quite a few minor ones as well (including several AutoHotkey scripts). And then Windows 7 came out, with its shiny new Start menu. No ...

Spotify, the (European) king of music-on-demand, is a real pain in the ass to actually use. I mean, it works, but only just. It's one of those annoying apps that minimises itself to your system tray -- and while that might be OK with Windows XP, on Windows 7 that's just crap. I want Spotify on my SUPERBAR! I want the ability to stop, start and change tracks without having to dig Spotify out of my ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/04/26/the-life-changing-list-of-keyboard-shortcuts-for-windows-users/'; There is always at least two ways of doing something on a Windows PC. If you've learnt by doing, rather than from a book, you probably only know one way. Watch your mother use a word processor one day -- I bet she uses File > Save rather than hitting Ctrl+S. What about ...

Vimium is an incredible Chrome add-on for keyboard-only Web navigation. Its basic shortcuts are modeled after those used in the ubergeek-oriented Vim text editor. The idea behind Vimium is that all of the most common actions (scrolling up and down, switching tabs, zooming) can be done using keys that are either on the home row of the keyboard, or otherwise very easy to reach (such as "zi" for ...

If you do a lot of typing on your computer, you owe it to yourself to install a good text expander. You type a couple of characters, and you get a whole phrase. It's a fantastic way to increase your productivity and reduce repetitive typing (except for your abbreviations, of course). For those of you using Google Chrome, there's a slick new extension which puts a text expander right inside your ...

A computer's keyboard and mouse have never been very good as an interface to play a virtual piano, but The Virtual Keyboard takes an interesting approach that makes the resulting music much more appealing. While you can individually click on any key on the piano's keyboard to hear the resulting tone, where it shines is in its ability to play predetermined chords just by pressing a number key on ...

I have a lot of friends that own both a Blackberry and an iPod Touch. When I ask them why they didn't just get an iPhone, I often hear that they "need a real keyboard". I have to admit that when I started with my iPhone, I wasn't sold on the idea of a soft-keyboard (one that exists only in software through the touchscreen), but it took only a short time to be convinced. I feel reasonably fast when ...

Do you remember how great it felt to switch from T9 to a full qwerty keyboard on your phone? No more laborious multiple taps just to get one letter! Well, the developers of an app called Swype are hoping you'll get the same feeling when you compare their product to the software keyboard on your Android device. Swype brings a new way of typing to Android phones: instead of tapping each letter, you ...

The Chrome Extension Gallery push is on, and we're finally starting to see some solid add-on options cropping up for Google's web browser. If you're the type who eschews the mouse or trackpad in favor of keyboard-fu, you owe it to yourself to check out the Vimlike Smoozie [translated] extension. It's similar to Vimperator for Firefox in that it adds a number of keystroke-driven controls to ...