Domain of the Bored

Last week, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin released episode 20 of their podcast, The Talk Show. It was devoted to the Apple Extended Keyboard (the Saratoga) and Apple Extended Keyboard II (the Nimitz). This renewed my interest in bringing my own Nimitz back into service using a Griffin iMate.

The Nimitz is the greatest keyboard ever made for the Macintosh. It has the best keys, the best height adjustment, the best Caps Lock key (it physically locks down!)—everything.

One of its distinctive features is a couple of pegs near the top of the keyboard—one near the Escape key, and another near the Power key.

The Saratoga had, printed under the F1 through F4 keys, the words “undo”, “cut”, “copy”, and “paste”. Because these definitions were useless (not to say confusing) to most Mac users, the Nimitz moved these labels to a plastic overlay that came with the keyboard. Those who actually needed it could put it on, which they did by hanging it on those two pegs, and everyone else could simply leave it in the box.

That overlay is even more useless today. But I think the idea of an overlay defining the function keys is a good one, especially as Mac OS X has made the function keys actually useful.

So I decided to make a new overlay.

My original plan was to distribute the EPS file for this overlay, and provide instructions on how to customize it.

After writing that it's easy to edit the file, followed by an entire page of instructions on how to do that properly, I decided it would be better to write an application to do it for you. I call this application the Apple Extended Keyboard II Overlay Generator.

I've included with the application two ready-made overlays: a replica of the classic Apple overlay; and my Mac OS X overlay. You also have the option of editing them or creating your own from scratch.

Assembly instructions (among other information) and the download are on the webpage.

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