Hump Day Hardware: Keyboards Revisited

About a month ago I covered keyboards in my Hump Day Hardware blog posting. One of the keyboards I featured was the Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000. After writing about it, I got more and more intrigued by the features it offers. My old Microsoft keyboard was a few years old and the new one only cost $32. That's right, I had to get one for myself.

I've been using it the last couple of days now and I really am impressed. Little things like padding on the wrist rest, the calculator key, the back and forward keys and the other programmable keys. I also thought it was cool that the common function of a letter key is written on the front of it. Like Ctrl + C is Copy, right? That means the C key has the word copy of the front of it as a little reminder. Best of all is the zoom slider in the middle of the keyboard. I don't use a mouse and that means I don't have a scroll wheel. The zoom slider gives me something very close to that scroll wheel.

Think about how much you use your keyboard. This is a small price to pay for a replacement that gives you a lot of bang for the buck.

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Hump Day Hardware: Keyboards

For the CorelDRAW Unleashed User Conference, we ordered several new computers from Dell. Everything was great about the computers except for one thing. As I was preparing them, I found it next to impossible to type on the supplied keyboards.

They looked great and they had a very small footprint. But the functionality was absolutely awful. This reminded me just how important it is to have a good quality keyboard. Of course Dell doesn't mention their keyboard anywhere and I couldn't find a picture of one to show you.

I've been using an ergonomic keyboard for at least ten years. That was probably part of the reason I struggled so much to use the Dell keyboards. I am a big believer in the ergo keyboards and my favorite is definitely the ones from Microsoft. Their latest and greatest is the Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000 and it sells for under $40. If you are spending your day interfacing with a computer, it is important to have a tool that works with you instead of against you. Those of you who have never used an ergonomic keyboard may take a day or two to adjust, but after a short period of time you'll absolutely love it. Another version of the keyboard is available packaged together with a mouse in the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Desktop 7000. Since I rarely use a mouse, it isn't really the right package for me. I'm a fan of Wacom tablets and we'll talk about that in a future post.

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Form Filling and Internet Explorer Don't Mix

I've gotten a few e-mails in the past few weeks from users saying they couldn't fill out forms on the unleash.com or coreldrawunleashed.com Web site. We certainly know there is an issue for some users and I'll try to explain when the problem happens and several ways to work around the problem. We have tried to find a solution for the problem and would also be thrilled if anyone has a suggestion that would fix it.

First, the problem only occurs if you use Internet Explorer. If you use Firefox, Opera, Safari or pretty much any other browser you won't have any problems at all. I'm certainly a huge fan of Firefox. In my opinion it is much faster and more secure than Internet Explorer. It is my primary browser and I use it well over 90% of the time. So if you have the ability to use Firefox, it would help make your browsing experience better and this issue wouldn't be a problem.

I know that not everyone can or will switch browsers. Thus I have to suggest some workarounds. The problem is that users have trouble clicking on the form fields and inserting their cursor. We find that the form fields are indeed clickable, it is just that the clickable area is very small. Move your cursor to the top edge of the form field and it should change the cursor to indicate you can click. Once you've clicked in the first field, fill out the information and tab to the next field.

Another workaround is just to use the Tab key. It will Tab through all of the elements on the page. Don't be surprised if it takes 15 or more clicks to get to the first form field.

Again, we realize this is a bit of a hassle. We have spent hours researching the problem and testing potential solutions. None of them have worked so far. Since the problem only occurs in Internet Explorer and not in other browsers, we can only guess that there is a non-standard behavior in Internet Explorer causing the problem. Internet Explorer is full of non-standard behaviors so this wouldn't be a bit surprising. If that is the case, we hope Microsoft will get it fixed in the next release of Internet Explorer. If you have a solution that would fix the problem, please post a comment and let us know. We'll get the site fixed as soon as possible.

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Office 2003 vs CorelDRAW -- Users Lose

When Office 2003 SP3 was released, it blocked some file formats because they were deemed insecure. This included CorelDRAW CDR files. I find it funny that Microsoft calls the file formats of others insecure when Office files are some of the least secure file formats out there.

Corel is obviously not very happy with this. Gerard Metrallier, Director of Product Management, Graphics at Corel had the following to say.

"Microsoft recently announced that with the release of Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, installing this program will block certain files formats. According to a Microsoft knowledge base article on the subject, these file formats include CorelDRAW .CDR files because they are deemed less secure. Since this has posted, Corel has unsuccessfully tried to figure out the basis for categorizing .CDR files as 'less secure' and sites such as FrSIRT or US-CERT don't have any information about CorelDRAW.”

"CorelDRAW users can rest assured that they can still use CorelDRAW Graphics Suite normally on a system where Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 3 has been installed. This update from Microsoft does not impact CorelDRAW at all or the capability of opening .CDR files from within CorelDRAW or from Windows Explorer. We are currently working with Microsoft to get more details about this issue, as we want to make 100 percent certain our file formats pose no security concern for any of our users. Corel is not aware of any security issue related to the CorelDRAW .CDR file format. If there is a known problem that had security implications, we will get this resolved as quickly as possible.”

Obviously Corel isn't very happy that their formats are called insecure. I don't blame them. While there may be a possibility of insecurity, they are not used by a high enough percentage of users to be a format that hackers would likely target. I'm guessing the possibility exists because CorelDRAW files can contain VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros. Hmm, VBA is licensed from Microsoft.

There is a way to unblock the files. Microsoft has posted a knowledge base article about the blocking and how to edit the registry to unblock certain formats. I think it was Outlook 2000 that added blocking of certain attachment types, like EXE files, in a service pack. This also required a registry hack to bring them back. It shouldn't require a risky registry hack, there should be a dialog box in the program for users to select which formats to block.

Now as I understand this, it only affects files you wish to import into Office 2003 applications. Given that Microsoft had to reverse engineer the CDR format to import the files, it isn't a good idea to directly import a CDR file into Office. This also means the import filter doesn't support newer versions of CorelDRAW. Basically, it is much ado about nothing in my mind. Of course Microsoft suggest the problem can be solved by upgrading to Office 2007. While I enjoy Office 2007, I don't think this is a good ways to convince users to upgrade.

My suggestion, export your files from CorelDRAW to WMF, EMF or PNG (depending on how the file will be used) and import those files into CorelDRAW and this blocking won't affect you at all.

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