Polish keyboad on OSX – a rant
I recently had to write some Polish text on my MacBook Pro and discovered that the Polish keyboard is messed up. In fact, coming from a PC world I’ve always thought Mac’s keyboards are messed up (e.g., lack of Home/End PageUp/PageDown, which can be simulated by some weird and application-dependent two/three key combination, an almost completely useless Enter/Rename key, an annoying Eject key, which pressed accidentally generates an eject sound regardless whether you have something in your drive or not), but this time I got annoyed.
To give a bit of background, in Poland, we use nine additional letters, namely ęóąśłżźćń (and their uppercase counterparts) and historically typewriter’s keyboard had them allocated at the right side (where brackets and quotes are). Now, unless you’re a typewriter, this is not very useful (especially if you need the braces and quotes more often) and we have two Polish keyboard mappings: a typewriter’s keyboard and a programmer’s keyboard (with Polish letters generated with an Alt+<Latin letter>). As we have two z-derivatives: żź one of them is Alt+z (the more common ż) and the other is Alt+x (the less common ź).
Playing with my Mac I discovered that żź are swapped. I am not sure if there’s any rationale for it (apparently it was ok in OS9 and only changed in OSX), maybe it’s easier to press Alt+x (which gives a more commonly used character), in particular that on a PC it’s a right Alt, not the left one (in fact, I was trying to get it to be more ergonimic, I would remap the right Enter to Alt), but I found it confusing. To get a feeling what it’s like, imagine what if Apple replaced a Control key with Enter or PageUp with an eject button. Whops… they already did it. Imagine something else then 
Doing a bit of research I found discovered I am not the only one annoyed with it. Somebody made a correct programmer’s keyboard and which can be downloaded from here. There are two versions: one replacing a system file and one installing a local keyboard for a user. I took the latter approach and it works great!