The new Freestyle2, shown on the bottom with the black edge, is about 1/4″ thinner overall than the original. In case you haven’t noticed, the trend with keyboards runs toward thinner profiles. Thin keyboards undeniably look fantastic (see: Apple), but there’s an ergonomic benefit here too: The thinner your keyboard, the easier it is to get your hands properly above it, which can help your wrists stay in a more neutral position. Is a quarter inch less total thickness going to make a life-changing difference? Probably not, but the desk-hugging design of the Freestyle is just one more thing to like about it – and yes, it does look pretty good as well. If aesthetics are an important point, you should also be aware that there is no longer any silver color visible on the keyboard. It’s all sleek, incognito black now. (The Mac version 2, un-released as of this writing, will presumably be white like its predecessor.) Volume keys While working, I sometimes like a background stream of Internet radio. The problem is, my background ambiance becomes a foreground nuisance when the phone rings. By the time I manage to get my media player muted, I’ve usually missed the call. This has made me wish frequently for some basic media control keys on my Freestyle keyboard. At one point I felt so strongly about it that I remapped a seldom-used button to the single function of “mute.”. Included media control keys are volume up, down, and mute. Though it’s truly nice to have volume controls on the keyboard now, not everything is rosy in this department. One thing Kinesis didn’t change is the way the Fn key operates – like a toggle switch, not a momentary button. In case you’re not familiar with it, the Fn key is the shifter that enables alternate functions on the rest of the keyboard. Among these alternate functions are the volume keys, which, without Fn engaged, are simply F8-F10. Steam for mac os x snow leopard. The UpLift 900 Sit-Stand Ergonomic Desk is a simple, sturdy, height adjustable (26'), motorized desk without too many extra bells and whistles, but is still flexible and sports a powerful enough. Fn also activates the built-in numeric keypad, so it’s not the sort of thing you want to leave on at all times. And therein lies the rub. On an ordinary keyboard, the media buttons are single-purpose and work with one finger. On the Freestyle2, you need not only two fingers, but both hands; the Fn key is located too far from the media keys to hit the combination with just one. Worse, the Fn button is “sticky.” Remember the toggle switch vs. Momentary button comparison? ![]() Once you hit Fn, it stays engaged until you hit it again. That makes three – count ’em, three – keystrokes to mute the audio every time the phone rings, and three more to un-mute it after I hang up on the telemarketer. A few key changes Fn on the move. On the new Freestyle, Fn has switched placed with right-click. The Kinesis engineering department made some good decisions when they reshuffled the Freestyle’s keys. One of the best was moving the Fn key away from its old position next to the left Ctrl key. It was entirely too easy to hit Fn by accident with your pinkie finger, turning the keyboard into a “n5ght0are 6f n40bers and s-ec5a3 characters.” (That’s “nightmare of numbers and special characters,” typed on a Freestyle with Fn engaged.) To prevent annoying fits of gibberish like the one above, Kinesis moved the Fn key to the corner, swapping it with the relatively harmless right-click. Now, it’s much more difficult to accidentally hit the grammatical self-destruct with your little finger while typing.
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