Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Getting It On In Spanish


My keyboard is nothing like this!

A few years ago while I was in Tokyo, I thought how cool it would be to own a MacBook with the Japanese characters on the keyboard. I never did get around to buying a laptop there and I never thought about workflow using an unfamiliar keyboard.

Fast forward to 2011 and I'm using a friends MacBook to write posts to this blog - with a Spanish language keyboard. At first, you don't notice the difference. A roman character keyboard is a roman character keyboard. Until you start typing.


All My English Belongs To Spanish.

That's when it goes to hell. Suddenly, you're faced with lots of unfamiliar keys, keys out of place and your typing speed plummets. However, if you like to write Spanish words the macrons and tildas that are missing from an American QWERTY keyboard are all there. It's like magic.

Then there's the spell check. The blog is written in English. The MacBook is Spanish and 98% of the words that I write are marked for spell checking. Weird.

I think in an ideal world, I would have two MacBook Pros. One English and one Spanish, just because.