The Latest Windows Keyboard Is a Piece of Crap

Behold the inexplicably useless new Windows on-screen keyboard.

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I’m about to post some serious stuff—honest—but first I have to get something off my chest. I have never been as pissed off about an operating system “upgrade” as I am over the new on-screen keyboard in Microsoft’s latest Windows update.

The old OSK was fine. It took up about a third of the screen (vertically), included both letters and numbers, and the keys were plenty big even for me.

The new OSK takes up nearly half the screen, and it can’t be moved offscreen temporarily. If you try, it bounces back so the whole keyboard is visible. This means there’s very little screen space available when the keyboard is active, and there are times when you can barely see stuff in the middle of the screen no matter where you put the OSK. What’s even worse, the new OSK doesn’t allow you to highlight text. You can’t hold down the Shift key and use the arrows for highlighting. Since double tapping text is a very hit-or-miss affair on a Windows tablet, this means there’s literally no way to highlight text anymore.

I know how petty this sounds, but why? Why ruin a perfectly good keyboard? And even if Microsoft needed a new one to satisfy complaints of some kind, why not keep the old one around too? It’s still there in the code, after all. I know this since it pops up during boot when I need to enter my password. But there’s no way to access it during normal use.

This single, seemingly trivial change has made it all but impossible to blog on the tablet. I can still do it, but it’s hardly worth the effort, and it inflates my blood pressure every time I try. It’s really infuriating.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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