Yes, another new keyboard. This time it's an Apple Aluminium keyboard from the new iMac line. The basic reasoning behind this purchase is because I have wrecked the knuckles of my right hand in a fight with a door and a pane of glass, so I can't bend my middle or index fingers. This means that traditional keyboards cause a problem due to their long key travel, but notebook keyboards are fine. The new Apple aluminium keyboard is almost identical to the 'chiclet' design of the MacBook, so is very much like a notebook keyboard writ large.

As already mentioned, the keyboard is almost the same as the MacBook keyboard. This means that the entire keyboard assembly is about 1/3" thick, and the key travel is around 1/16". Despite the fact that this is a tiny distance, it feels perfectly adequate for a decent tactile feedback. There are many sites dedicated to those who love and those who hate this keyboard and its cousins on the MacBook, so I'll spare you the vitriol.

OK, so I've got this keyboard, but I don't use it at home. Oh no, I have a MacBook there that satisfies all my home typing needs. I can SSH and VNC to my other machines so I rarely need to use a different keyboard. Except when the missus nicks the Mac of course, then I use the iGo as reviewed the other day.

On Windows, the keyboard functions just as a normal USB keyboard, albeit with a bunch of missing keys. There is no insert key, which is really annoying for those of us who like to shift-insert to paste instead of ctrl-v, or who have to (for instance, in Xterms). The volume controls and what-have-you don't work either. It's a shame, but there it is.

Unless you're really cunning. Then you'd get hold of the Boot Camp drivers disk for Windows from apple.com and install that! Or you would, were it available. It seems that Apple, in their somewhat short-sighted wisdom, have limited the ability to access the driver disk to only those people who have bought Leopard and are running it on a Mac. I'm sure allowing the individual drivers for the keyboard, mighty mouse and so forth could be made available so that Apple could easily sell peripherals to non-Mac owners, but that seems to go against the grain. Well, it would, except for the existence of iTunes and Safari for Windows ... Anyway ...

So some nice person over at Knipper John's C#kes has extracted the drivers out of the boot camp image, and provided some suitable commentary. You can get Version 1.4 with the Boot Camp control panel or just plain Version 2.0.

So there we go. Very nice keyboard, sleek and easy to type on if you have knuckle problems. Just a pain to get everything working properly with Windows.