EjectKey
Latest
On re-purposing the increasingly useless eject key
The eject key sits in the upper right corner of most modern Apple keyboards. On my big iMac with its SuperDrive, it occasionally gets pressed when I need to kick out a backup DVD, but the rest of the time it sits alone. It's even worse on a MacBook Air. With no SuperDrive to speak of, the eject key was replaced with a tiny power button and the eject function moved to the F12 key next door. What do you do with a key that has outlived its usefulness? Give it another reason to live! This all got started when one of the employees at Other World Computing, the folks who make all of those fast internal SSDs for MacBook Pros and other devices, had the optical drive on his 2011 MacBook Pro removed and replaced with an OWC Data Doubler + 750 GB hard disk drive. OWC's Erik was already enjoying a speedy 480 GB SSD as his startup drive in the MacBook Pro, but wanted the luxury of more storage. With his eject key now taking up space and not paying the rent, Erik looked around and found a free app called KeyRemap4MacBook. The app remaps most of the non-alphanumeric keys on the Macbook keyboard to a set of different functions. Not only can you assign duplicate keys (Option and Command keys, for example) to perform different functions, but KeyRemap4MacBook makes keys do different things depending on what app you're currently using (note that you can already do this to a point using Keyboard Shortcuts in System Preferences). Erik used the app to remap his eject key to be a forward delete key (Fn + Delete), and noted that if he does happen to have an external optical drive connected to the MBP, KeyRemap4MacBook thoughtfully provides a way to use the eject key as, well, an eject key. One thing that KeyRemap4MacBook doesn't do is use a standard delay when pressed, so there's a companion app called NoEjectDelay by the same developer that clears the eject key delay. The inquiring minds at TUAW want to know what function you'd remap your eject key to perform, or if you'd just turn the eject key into one-half of a pair of cufflinks. Leave us a note in the comments below.
11.6-inch MacBook Air detailed
So, we've just been discussing the rumored, and long overdue, MacBook Air refresh with a trusted source. This person recently had a working model in their possession for a few minutes and managed to glean quite a bit of detail that would seemingly confirm Apple's plan to announce an 11-inch MacBook Air at the "Back to the Mac" event later today. Here's what we've been told to expect: Smaller 11.6-inch display. 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (with a 2.33GHz option possible). 2GB of memory in the base configuration. No optical drive, naturally. Mini DisplayPort, USB, and SD card reader along the left-hand side and USB and power on the right (that's 2x USB). The trackpad has been updated to match that of the new MacBook Pros. Although smaller due to the 11.6-inch display, it's still about the same thickness as the current MacBook Air. A black power key now sits immediately to the right of a smaller eject key on the MBA's keyboard -- the round aluminum power button is gone. A design decision that might support the MBA's rumored instant-on capabilities though our source didn't see this functionality exhibited (possibly because it was running OS X 10.6.4). Unfortunately, our source couldn't identify the graphics or the storage related to the rumored "SSD Card." So where does that leave us? Well, it looks like a smaller (and presumably, cheaper) MacBook Air originally rumored by AppleInsider is in the bag for a Steve Jobs announcement later today as is a refresh to the 13.3-inch model we broke last week (pictured nekkid above). So check back in a few hours and watch the reveal live, won't you? Update: Reader Lucas F. submitted a mockup of the new power and eject keys which you can see after the break. [Thanks, Anonymous]
