The Missing Key

Over the last couple of weeks I have come to a new and significant understanding about the design of modern keyboards, and a way that they could be significantly improved. What is needed is a "Do It" key. No, not the enter key, I mean a key that will always select the fastest route to completion of whatever task you just tried to perform.

For example, clicking the shutdown item in the system menu often presents you with a list of choices, shutdown, reboot, log out etc. What I want is a button which on pressing makes the computer shutdown when presented with this dialogue without you having to select anything. Similarly closing a program you might be asked "Do you want to save? Yes/No/Cancel" I want a button which will actually close the program regardless of the default action here and which will close the program if it says "You haven't saved, quit anyway?". Obviously with those two options you have to stop and read the dialogue and pick the right button, with my "Do It" button on the keyboard this would no longer be a problem.

Of course if you click the wrong thing, the dialogue will still come up and you will have the choice of reading it and selecting the right thing, however if you don't care and just want to exit straight away, all you have to do is press "Do It" and it will.

Hopefully that's all clear and the worlds keyboard manufacturers and software writers have seen this and will get together to make this imminently sensible suggestion reality.

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