A Review of 3-D Keyboard 2.4

The following is excerpted with permission from the October '95 issue of P.C. Alamode, the award-winning newsletter of the Alamo P.C. Organization, Inc.

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I was “surfing the Net” the other night and I found a message from a fellow Alamo PC member named Pete Cassetta. He joined in July of this year at the Microsoft meeting. Pete is a software developer with Fingertip Software located in Universal City. One of his products is called 3-D Keyboard.

Pete says it’s the “easiest way to type all the useful characters in your fonts.” I have to agree! This is a Windows program and takes advantage of all the basic Windows features and works in most Windows and WIN-OS/2 applications. This is not a DOS utility. It is one of those neat “must have” Windows utilities that Microsoft forgot, especially if you do any writing or are a student or “chat” on the Internet.

In a time when most applications are space hogs (you know, buy a program, buy a drive) all that is required here is Windows 3.1 and 140 kilobytes of space. (That’s kilobytes, not megs!)

First I got 3-D Keyboard in ZIP format, unzipped it and ran the install routine, fast and easy. It is one executable which creates the five (read this only five) files needed for the program. When the program comes up you get a keyboard display in a window.

You will notice a lot of characters added to the keyboard. The additional characters are now available for you to use in any Windows™ application.

These additional characters are now present on your keyboard; you just type them in using a toggle key you can define. The default toggle key as displayed above is the right Alt key. Pete defines the function as a “Third symbol key.”

You can choose from 12 pre-defined keyboard layouts in the evaluation version and in the registered version you can define your own keyboard! The full set of characters you may select from is shown below.

Will it work with Windows 95?

I use Windows 3.1 so I asked Phyllis Christian to run it through its paces on Windows 95.

Hi, I am writing this with MS WordPad in Windows 95 to try and demo 3-D Keyboard. I am using 3-D Keyboard in the Enhanced U.S. mode for this document, which satisfies my needs pretty well. I am not a big word processor user any more, but when I need one I use this. It is always irritating when I want to refer to a watermelon half and I have to say, 1/2 a watermelon instead of ˝ a watermelon.

Then there is the cents sign...where are you when I need you? Right here, 99˘. Now how is that for quick and easy? Are you talking about Japanese yen 99Ą or British pounds 99Ł? Now I switched to the U.K. keyboard without even a ripple to get to the ¬ symbol and then back to the Enhanced U.S. keyboard with a click. It has keyboards for France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Latin America, Finland/Sweden, Netherlands, and the U.K. besides the standard U.S. and Enhanced U.S keyboards. It certainly isn’t lacking in anything that I have stumbled across.

My keyboard is different than most with a large enter key so I clicked under options and was able to change to my own keyboard layout design with a single click.

The program works well with most Windows applications and word processors for Windows or WIN-OS/2. A known limitation is use in Windows Calculator. If you switch to a DOS Window the keyboard automatically reverts to the standard U.S. keyboard so you don’t have to worry about getting weird characters when you don’t want them. Easy to install, use and remove. The online help is good and thorough. The printed manual serves as a great tutorial of basic Windows navigation and the ini file display in the manual will help anyone get over fears of ini or dll files. Tech support is only an e-mail or phone call away.

Best of all, 3-D Keyboard does not install any device drivers or modify any system files on your computer (AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, WIN.INI, SYSTEM.INI, etc), so removing the program is a breeze (but never needed). Whenever you want your regular old keyboard back just exit the program. If every Windows utility were built like this we’d never need those uninstall programs where we cross our fingers and pray!

You can get it on Alamo PC BBS once they permit uploads again. In the meantime you can get it on other local BBSes, or on the Internet at http://www.fingertipsoft.com

Pete provided Phyllis and me with review copies for the P.C. Alamode and we both liked it so much we’ve gone ahead already and purchased them with the manual and disk.