omh@nancy (Owen M. Hartnett) (04/26/88)
[Andy Rooney type diatribe follows:]
Did'ja ever notice that Apple can't get it right when it comes to the
numeric keypad. I mean, they keep moving around the keys, plus is minus and
minus is plus on some keyboards. It makes you crazy when you try to use
the Calculator DA. Well, I know you can buy different calculators and
they're much better, and so forth, but Apple has a calculator and it should
at least be somewhat useful.
The worst part, the thing that really drives me crazy, is that they get the
Enter key wrong. Anyone who's ever used a 12-key pad to enter a column of
numbers on a real adding calculator knows that the Enter key should be the
equivalent of the Plus key, not the equals key. They had it right in the
very early days of the Mac (Finder 1.1 BC), but they changed it. Apparently
no one at Apple uses a 12-key pad to enter numbers.
Well, I went nuts one day and attacked it with Tmon and MacNosy. Now I'm
not suggesting anyone do this (after all this is Official Apple Software
I'm talking about), but if someone took Fedit or Mac Snoop and changed
the hex string in the calculator Desk Accessory from:
4CAD 452B
to
4C2B 452B
they'd find that the Enter key acts like the plus key (the plus key even
lights up on the calculator). This really makes Calculator useful to me, at
last. This works okay on the macPlus and Mac II with the small (not extended)
keyboard, and may work okay on other keyboards as well. Now you can total
up all the checks you write to Apple computer without having to look for
the damn plus key, just slam down your pinky.
[End of Andy Rooney diatribe, it was easier to do than I thought.]
Owen Hartnett
Brown University Computer Science
omh@cs.brown.edu.CSNET
omh%cs.brown.edu
{ihnp4,allegra}!brunix!omh
"Don't wait up for me tonight because I won't be home for a month."
-W.C. Fields