Modes, Quasimodes and the iPhone

This reminds me of something that drives me nuts in Windows: the way you can temporarily turn off caps-lock by holding down the shift key. In theory, this is a great feature. If you are typing a lot of capitalized letters and want to hit just one lower-case letter, you can easily do it by holding down shift.

In practice you rarely need to do this. What happens so much more frequently (to me) is you’ll accidentally have the caps-lock on, go to type a uppercase letter and have it end up lowercase. Thinking you just didn’t hold down the shift key you’ll backspace and try again. Only the second or third time through do you realize that caps lock is on, so you hit the caps lock key. Out of habit, you won’t hold down shift after hitting caps lock, typing yet another string of lowercase letters. Trying not to freak out you take a few deep breaths, lift your hands off the keyboard and carefully turn the fucking caps lock off.