The new Macbook Pro keyboard

It’s been a while, but this deserves shouting from the rooftops – the new 17” Macbook Pro has an alt key on the right hand side of the keyboard.

Not that big news for most right handers, but it’s massive news if you’re a lefty.

Previously all us cack handers (most creative and intelligent people in the world don’t you know), had to use something like Double Command to force the pointless extra enter key to become an alt key.

It also meant massive frustration when Double Command refused to work, such as on my second machine, a white Macbook. If you tried to ‘drag copy’ a file, i.e. dragging the file whilst holding alt, you’d just end up highlighting the name of the file. Worse still if you tried drag copying in Illustrator you’d end up moving the object miles away as the enter key triggers the move dialogue box, and Illustrator would interpret the holding of the enter key as multiple presses.

But no more. I can now use my keyboard like the millions of uncreative people out there.