Fix yur McBook kyboad problms with the ingenious Unshaky app

Apple’s third-generation butterfly keyboard was supposed to fix all the previous defects but buyers continue to experience problems with its design, as recently highlighted in The Wall Street Journals’s damning column penned by the ever-amusing, unapologetic Joanna Stern.

A new software-based approach attempts to address the double keypress issue that some Mac notebook owners have been complaining about. As you know, this issue occurs when a speck of dust enters the incredibly tight butterfly mechanism, causing the key to get stuck.

Called Shaky, the app kills second press of a key that occurs within milliseconds of the first. This is a very effective solution to the stupid problem that Apple in its pursue of thinness has foolishly brought onto itself. The app sits in the menu bar and works in the background to sense and dismiss problematic double key presses.

Apple made it difficult to replace only the keyboard and it costs hundreds of dollars. Unshaky might save your keyboard by dismissing such ‘second key hits’ (any key presses that occur no later than x milliseconds after the previous effective one). I fixed my ‘w’ key with Unshaky. If it does not work for you, open an issue here.

Click the menu bar icon to see how many double presses the app has ignored so far. “Since installing it, I rarely get a repeat ‘E’ or ‘R’,” Joanna said.

To make Unshaky truly useful, click the menu bar icon and choose Configuration to bring up the settings interface. From there, you can adjust the delay for each key separately, which will come in handy when specific keys become stuck or begin working unreliably.

Unshaky was developed by Xinhong Sam Liu, a 25-year-old grad student in Vancouver, British Columbia. The homebrewed software is currently in beta and can be downloaded for free either through the official website or from the Github release page.

The image below illustrates how Unshaky works.

If you’re concerned about your privacy, you’ll feel a little better knowing that this app does not send out any user information to the cloud nor does it record your keystrokes.

To learn more, visit the official Unshaky website.

The butterfly keyboard debuted in the twelve-inch MacBook and has since expanded to all Mac notebooks, including the 2016 and later MacBook Pro models and the 2018 MacBook Air. Currently in its third-generation, the keyboard mechanism continues to exhibiting issues.

Apple has recently apologized to the affected customers, saying only “a small number of users” are still having issues with the butterfly mechanism. In the summer of 2018, the iPhone maker launched a keyboard service program to fix or replace your stuck keys at no charge, or get refunded in case you had already paid for an out-of-warranty replacement.