When Apple released the new iMacs with the new ultra slim keyboard a couple of months ago, I wondered right away: how did they put this thing together

? how did they manage to screw the top and bottom parts parts together

?

So I ordered one from Amazon. My impression: it’s no Moshi Celesta (my favorite keyboard) but it’s nice. I know the verdict is not unanimous, but I personally like the laptop style keys and I find them the way to go.

I still dislike how close the function keys row is to the rest; I thought that somethinglike this would look and work better:

But I digress.

I bought this keyboard to disassemble it and ended up taking

it apart.

Disassembly implies that you can reassemble it, but not this puppy. It can only be taken apart because the top and bottom parts are not screwed together as I had assumed: they are glued. The entire surface of the keyboard is glued, not just

the edges.

Somehow, I need to convince the accounting software that this keyboard is now an R&D expense instead of, err, an asset.

Miscellaneous notes:

- The top is a stamped or die cast aluminum, the bottom plastic.

- Inside, you will find sheets made of stamped metal and conductive rubber.

- The rubber feet are dropped in from the inside, not glued from the outside as is typical with most products.

- All the electronics is contained in

the sm all PCB on the b

ack and is connected to the keyboard matrix via a ribbon connector.

You can click on the images below for a larger version. Got other products that you want to peek inside

?

As mature adults know, language matters.

The question is: c an you be

a designer wanting to create beautiful things, and ye t

use crude language

? Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think so.

I bring this up because of today’s talk by Richard Seymour at the Intersections Conference.

As reported by core77.com, Mr. Seymour urges that you “get the best design brains on the hardest problems–no more f***ing cruets for Italian luxury goods companies, get off your arse”, and that “if you’re not an optimistic futurist in design, f*** off and do things a lot less damaging”.

I’m not a professional designer — merely a chap trying to figure out how to design better products — so I had to look up who Richard Seymour is.

One site describes him and Dick Powell as “Europe’s best-known product design duo”. Great, so there are exceptions to every rule.

But I still think that you cannot think crude, talk crude, then design not-so-crude.

Or if you can, then at the very least you are making things more difficult for yourself.

Mr. Seymour aside, I have always wondered about the use of crude language by creative types such as painters, programmers, and architects.

If a creative type person cannot come up with a non-crude expression, is he really creative? Or this is a warning flag that perhaps he is not happy in the current job or caree

r?

Just wondering aloud…

When Apple released Safari for Windows, it wanted Windows users to experience their “superior” font rendering technology.

Joel Spolsky disagrees with Apple and prefers Microsoft’s font rendering algorithm.

And I respectfully disagree with Joel.

First, a bit of person

al background.

As someone who purchased the original Mac 128K back in February 1984, it’s easy to label me as an Apple “fanboy”. After all, only Steve Jobs and a tiny handful of Apple employees have owned Macs for longer than I did. Up until 1995, the Mac was my main computer whereas Windows remained the development one.

Roles reversed when Windows 95 was introduced: Microsoft was doing a great job whereas Apple was slipping.

But there was one thing that I never liked about Windows: its font rendering.

It always seemed to me that text looked out of focus.

Things didn’ t improve wi

th Windows XP.

In fact, one of the main reasons that I switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox 1.0 a few years back was this bug in IE: every once in a while (sometimes every day, sometimes every couple of weeks), IE would cause XP to revert

to smoothing fonts.

I was never able to find out what precisely caused this to happen, but it did and I couldn’t stand XP’s method of smoothing.

In 2005, it became increasingly clear to me that Apple was back in the saddle and racing ahead.

I switched back to using Macs as a primary machine.

One can argue all day long about the merits of one sub-pixel rendering algorithm versus the other, but to me, the Mac’s is clearly (no pun intended) superior to Windows’. I find Apple’s Preview program just amazing in its clarity of rendering font and lines.

Welcome to my first blog entry.

This is where I get to share my thoughts on user interface design, product design, software development, and other fun stuff.

It is also where I can talk about Cedrus products like SuperLab and Lumina in a way that is not possible with a formal news release or product page.