iPad Keyboard Dock's Secret Button

Why is there a blank button on the iPad Keyboard Dock?



Here is a list of the buttons:

1. Home
2. Search
3. Brightness-down
4. Brightness-up
5. Photo album
6. Keyboard toggle
7. BLANK
8. Skip-back
9. Play/pause
10. Skip-forward
11. Mute
12. Volume-up
13. Volume-down
14. Lock screen

Ok, so my MBP has no blank function keys. My Apple aluminum wired keyboard has two, F5 and F6, which are taken up by the keyboard backlight controls on my MBP. F5 and F6 still exist because programs use them for shortcuts. But what about the iPad? What can it do on there? Well it seems like there is nothing in the SDK for it. So why even make a button at all? Won't that confuse people--it seems unlike Apple to put something useless on their keyboard. The button doesn't do anything, at least not yet.

As some of you may know, I'm the guy who for weeks has been saying that Apple will implement a dashboard on the iPad, be it secretively in March or for certain in OS 4.0. The iPad demo lacked many widget-like apps, like weather, stocks, even a calculator among others! But you can read more about that here.

So this morning I got to thinking about the iPad keyboard. Certainly Apple would have a key for it on their official iPad dock. Was there some clue on the keyboard? So I googled and found high resolution images on iLounge and spotted the missing button. And guess where it is? Right about where the dashboard button is on a mac. Again, on my Apple aluminum wired keyboard, there is dashboard, blank F5, blank F6, and skip-back. On the iPad, it is keyboard hide, BLANK, and skip-back. The only key with a specific function on an Apple keyboard before skip-back is dashboard, and on the iPad the blank button is right before skip-back. Coincidence? Seems unlikely.

So I want to know what you guys think. Sound off in the comments and let me know!

DoFoT9 said:

they probably have no use for it yet. currently the apple keyboards F5 and F6 have nothing assigned to them by default.

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I mentioned that in my post. The thing is, on Macs, F5 and F6 correspond to shortcuts in various applications. For instance, in most browsers F5 refreshes the page. I suppose they could allow for it to be a user configurable button in a future software update, but for now it seems a bit out of place on a device that has all software buttons, and where the official Apple keyboard dock would have to provide only functions to least common denominator apps, such as the ones that are baked in. Apple typically doesn't create buttons that have no function at all whatsoever on their products. For example, they could have put a mail icon there, since that is likely to be a commonly used app. But a dashboard--that would let you quickly glance at your inbox, the weather, pull up a calculator while you're in another app, etc. That makes sense. Think of it as multitasking lite edition. It's not that I'm wishcasting here. I am simply looking at the information supplied and seeing a pattern. Sure it would be nice if the iPad had this at launch, but I don't really mind if it doesn't. I'll be purchasing one either way. I'm just having fun figuring out the puzzle.

juice said:

It's the home screen button. Same icon as the home screen button on the iphone/ipod touch.

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Like I stated above, the home screen button is the first button. It has the rounded rectangle.

t0mat0 said:

Widgets?

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Precisely. Lite-apps that don't use many processing cycles and can run in the background easily.

9to5mac.com picked up my story! Nice.

http://9to5mac.com/apple-secret-ipad-key-354986743

Dashboard widgets, here we come.