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June 22, 2006
Simple program for inserting special characters
Every once in a while, I want to insert a special character or accented letter. Like when I'm writing an e-mail to my friend Renée, or blogging about French towns called Jumièges, or practicing my Español. I usually have to find some special menu or look up ASCII character code to put in the correct character I need. ¡Cómo frustra! (How frustrating!)
But today I stumbled upon a piece of freeware called MoreKeys that makes this simple. MoreKeys, by Braser Soft, is a very simple program for inserting characters into text by selecting the character from a small hovering window. You can easily switch between several language sets and a simple symbol set.
There are other programs that do something similar, like the Open Source Quick Key, but I like MoreKeys' simplicity. (I actually discovered MoreKeys under a list of related programs on the Quick Key site.)
There was one thing about the program I found unintuitive, though. The top row of symbols (- o ? *) are actually menu keys (minimize, options, help, and choose language, respectively).
And there's something a bit odd about the web site. If you go to the home page from the MoreKeys page, you can't get back to the MoreKeys page. It isn't listed under their programs or on the site map. Makes me wonder if they've abandoned the program (no longer supporting it) and the MoreKeys page lives on as a kind of disembodied entity. So I guess it's a case of freeloader beware!
Posted by rigd0003 at June 22, 2006 12:11 PM | Computer-related