I purchased a decent mechanical keyboard; it's a ducky Shine 3. Duckys (despite the strange name) seem to be very high quality mechanical keyboards. This model, as with most of their models, has no menu / right-click key. I use this key constantly. Some of the other model's manuals indicate that there is some key-combination that will activate menu, but not this one. This workaround will apply for any keyboard that lacks any built-in way to activate menu.
I don't use the right-windows key. That key is in approximately the same spot as the menu key usually is (and I always look down to press the menu key), so I re-mapped that key to activate menu.
To get the proper value into the registry, I used SharpKeys. That utility allows you to type in the keys you want to re-map, so I plugged in a different keyboard that actually had the menu key, typed in the keys to re-map, and saved the value to the registry (requires reboot after adding). Thanks SharpKeys!
Here is all that is required in a .reg file in order to add this value to the registry:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,5d,e0,5c,e0,00,00,00,00
Friday, October 06, 2017
Monday, February 06, 2017
Will Web Applications be Fixed Soon?
I read recently that in-browser apps are extremely favored over native apps (people use their favorite social media app and maybe one other and don't bother with anything else). This makes sense; users are taking the path of least resistance - don't bother installing something unless you have to.
But yet, in-browser applications are so frequently busted. They even seem to get worse as time goes on in some cases. I used to listen to slacker and pandora in the browser. Slacker stopped working some time ago (in any browser), and pandora stopped working recently. I mean not working as in not at all - can't make it through more than one song without hanging the browser. So I started using spotify which seems to default to having you install a client. It works. You can even pause your song and it resumes at the exact place the next time you open the app. The UI is terrible IMO, but it works. Isn't this the goal, to actually work?
Web as a platform for applications still seems like a hack after all this time. I remember getting excited about Silverlight back in the day: yay, we can write an application and it will work like an application! It was a workaround for web as platform. Then Silverlight (and Flash) died.
Now Service Workers / WebAssembly seem to be the next candidate to overcome the web as platform hack. Will they enable applications to actually work in browsers, or will they go the way of flash? Both are starting out as actual standards, so they seem promising.
If they do catch on, won't that render most of the native app work obsolete? Maybe these technologies can't help whatever broke slacker/pandora? What other capabilities will remain un-achievable at that point?
But yet, in-browser applications are so frequently busted. They even seem to get worse as time goes on in some cases. I used to listen to slacker and pandora in the browser. Slacker stopped working some time ago (in any browser), and pandora stopped working recently. I mean not working as in not at all - can't make it through more than one song without hanging the browser. So I started using spotify which seems to default to having you install a client. It works. You can even pause your song and it resumes at the exact place the next time you open the app. The UI is terrible IMO, but it works. Isn't this the goal, to actually work?
Web as a platform for applications still seems like a hack after all this time. I remember getting excited about Silverlight back in the day: yay, we can write an application and it will work like an application! It was a workaround for web as platform. Then Silverlight (and Flash) died.
Now Service Workers / WebAssembly seem to be the next candidate to overcome the web as platform hack. Will they enable applications to actually work in browsers, or will they go the way of flash? Both are starting out as actual standards, so they seem promising.
If they do catch on, won't that render most of the native app work obsolete? Maybe these technologies can't help whatever broke slacker/pandora? What other capabilities will remain un-achievable at that point?
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