Apple Cherry Popped

Okay, so tacky title, however I'm pleased to announce that close on the heels of my "Apple Keyboard Love" post I can announce that I actually bought my first Apple product - the USB keyboard. I have to say its a really nice piece of engineering for $29.95. Comapred to the equivalent Logitech or Belkin keyboards its a virtual piece of art. I think this is one case where Apple could sell a TON more product if they would just advertise it as PC compatible. Like iPod, its not about selling a Mac/Apple computer, its all about selling hardware that will suck you into the Apple clique.

I have to admit I spent half the day looking for and playing with software that would let me use all of the keyboards keys with a PC, something your average computer user would not do. In the end using the simple and free KeyTweak I got everything working except the CD eject key which apparently just does not send a scan code that can be mapped to anything useful. Oh well. Apart from that I set F13 to Print Screen, F14 to Last Track, F15 to Play/Pause and F16 to Next Track. The volume up, down and mute on/off keys seemed to work as they were. I also had to map the keypad "=" key to a regular "=".

6/6/06 Update: I recently discovered that Apple's BootCamp software has a bunch of drivers you can use with Windows XP that provide support for all the Apple hardware including the USB keyboard and its non-standard CD-Eject key. Unfortunately when I downloaded the image for the BootCamp software CD (free from Apple) I found it is in a .dmg format that my Windows CD burner software doesn't recognise (what's wrong with ISO images Apple?). So I'll have to hold off on getting the pesky CD-Eject working however to be honnest I almost always just press the eject button next to the CD slot my non-Apple hardware has (which is where its supposed to be).