FingerWorks Offers Replacement PowerBook Keyboard

JerryKnight writes "FingerWorks, the inventor of TouchStream keyboards such as the LP, is taking pre-orders for a drop-in replacement for the keyboard in a 15" PowerBook G4 that is pretty much the same thing as the LP. Now the beautiful PowerBook can be completely smooth. Words fail to express the enthusiasm felt by me and hopefully anyone else who has used these keyboards. No word on availability. List price: $259." It's called the MacNTouch. Hm.

Comments

great...

[kasper37]

Unless you use your left thumb for the space bar like I do...

Re:great...

[Shishio]

Wow, I never thought about what finger I use for spaces.

I had to open up terminal and type a sentence just to figure it out.

Re:great...

[Mr. Light Touch]

You can remap the BackSpace/Delete or any other key you like with our gesture editor (still in Beta). If you can put up with about a week's confusion from learning any new key swap, the thumb BackSpace will feel great for the rest of your life!

This is great news!

[AtariAmarok]

I was about to replace my Powerbook keyboard with one from an old Atari 400. Now I won't have to.

Interesting, but perhaps too responsive

[Bookwyrm]

After looking at some of the sample gestures for the keyboard, I have to admit I am somewhat impressed. Some very interesting ideas there. After looking at more of the sample gestures for the touch keyboard, I am still impressed, but wary.

It reminds me of the problems with 'logically designed languages'. (i.e. all words for colors in the language might start with "cro", "crob" is blue, "crog" is green, "cror" is red, etc. The problem being that a single typos in the word might still be a valid word of a similiar type, but not what you meant.) I suspect someone who became a total expert with the keyboard could do just fine, but an intermediate user could get highly frustrated -- forgetting to use/accidently using an extra finger in a gesture might cause some unwanted operation to happen, not merely cause the desired operation to not happen. Maybe the software is smart enough to second guess some of these issues, but...

Go to the company's page and look at the Enhanced Modifier Chords -- if you tap with six fingers on the home row, you get an Enter -- if you tap six fingers on the row above the home row, you get an Esc key press. (Personally, I would immediately redefine those two gestures to have far more difference between the two -- accidently hitting "Enter" when one meant "Escape" in some dialog boxes would be very bad.) Or the shift/control differences.

Of course, one could just not use the gestures, but then why bother with the keyboard?

Nonetheless, very interesting ideas, but it may not be ready for everyone.

Re:Interesting, but perhaps too responsive

[Yarn]

...and would not go back to using a mechanical one

This is why I'm dubious, I have to use a lot of different machines, it isn't economic to replace the keyboards for them all, and this would just confuse me. QWERTY may be a crappy standard, but it is a standard.

Looks nice

[weeeeed]

BUT... ;) ...looking at the layout(which I hope is not final), why is the function key replaced with shift? When I reach out for the fn key on my current keyboard I have trouble accessing the other keys covered by the left hand. I know I have small hands, but come on... leave it where it is at the current size (two keys wide).

Same for return... umm enter... where is return??? I know quite some apps, where return and enter have different functions... take Fire for example: return sends out, enter makes a new line in the message... I do not think I would want to use additional shift for this. And it IS far too small, leave it at the current size, it was already difficult enough for me to stop hitting back-slash all the time...

Overall:
the whole right part of the keyboard is messed up and will require you to get used to the new layout.

Too much self advertisement... use it for bigger keys instead, although the hand is quite cute.

Can I press command + option with one finger only? I hope so.

NO IBOOK?

What about the heat? I have 1GHz and it gets quite hot already. If you look at the current keyboard, it is designed to provide better air circulation. You think it is not important? Buy the hoover TiBook, wait until the fans go on, lift the keyboard and wait for a while... the fans go off. With the keyboard it takes longer time for the fans to go off, I dunno about MacNTouch with no holes at all.

I do not think I will buy it, maybe I would for my iBook, but it has IMO too many design/usability flaws. I had to try it out first.

weeeee

Power Drain on battery

[Anonymous Coward]

I read a review onthe TouchStream LP somewhere that said it cut battery life in half when used on notebooks! I hope the powerbook version draws less power.

I haven't measured, but the keyboard on my TiBook looks very similar to the one in my iBook... I wonder if it would work in both?

Still, for the money, perhaps it would be better to buy the TouchStream LP and just bring it along with you. It folds up for portability. I know the drop in replacement is slick, but it means it will only ever work on the TiBook... if you are like me and move from machine to machine, I think portability of such an expensive keyboard would outweigh the wow-factor of having it built in to the TiBook.

But then, maybe I am crazy. Or something.

Re:Power Drain on battery

[Mr. Light Touch]

I think the 'cut battery life in half' was a bit of an exaggeration, unless the reviewer's test was on a mini-notebook. We don't have the final specs yet, but the MacNTouch should use less than half as much power as the TouchStream LP, which uses 250mA@5V -> 1.25 Watts/hour. The 15" PowerBook's battery supposedly has a 61 W-hour capacity. You do the math...

As we're able to reduce the TouchStream LP's power usage, we'll update its tech specs page as well.

What about the trackpad?

[BandwidthHog]

Not to troll, but getting a replacement 2 button trackbad to the market is the only way I'd ever be able to use an Apple laptop. I've got an old 190cs as a toy, but for daily use? Nope.

Of course, maybe I should be suggesting same to manufacturer, rather than bitching about it to the slashbots?

Re:What about the trackpad?

[addaon]

How hard would it be to do this as a home-made mod? Even if a company were to come out with a two-button trackpad add-on (which I would love, even though I don't have a personal need for it; choice is good), it ain't going to be for anything older than a albook / ibook (I'm surprised this keyboard is for the nearly-dead tibook). Looking at my ibook, the clicky thing (button) is right in the center of the trackpad button, so the right-hand third of the button could be removed without problems. This leaves a left-click button larger than the potential right button, but as left-click is more common anyway, this could be argued away as a good thing. Now, what can we put in the space we have? I haven't looked inside an ibook for a while, but imagine we're quite space-limited. Even so, it shouldn't be hard to wire in something from a membrane keypad or some such, or even or a more typical switch in the available space. Now, how to connect it? I suspect this is where we get bit, although on an albook without bluetooth, it's manageable. The bluetooth modules in the albooks hook up to usb headers. All you need is the board out of a usb mini-mouse, wire it up to the usb sensor, and rewire the right-button switch to use the switch you added. To the OS, the left and right button signals will appear to come from different mice, but that should be acceptable. The iBook, at least, has enough empty space for an additional circuit board that size (wrap it in electrical tape and just stick it in somewhere)... haven't been inside an albook yet.

Anyone have any suggestions for improvement to this technique?

Re:What about the trackpad?

[TheRaven64]

Whenever I'm at a Windows laptop, I find myself constantly hitting the wrong button below the trackpad.
Well, I guess it's all just a matter of what you're used to.

Not entirely true. I'm used to 3+ buttons, and I constantly hit the wrong button on a windows machine's trackpad. One thing I did like was the way the right hand edge of the tackpad on said machine worked as a scroll wheel (which is something I miss far more than the second button when I use an Apple mouse). Does / can the PowerBook trackpad do this?

Re:What about the trackpad?

[Baumi]

Not quite, but uControl offers similar functionality: You can scroll via trackpad by pressing the function key (configurable).

It's mainly a keyboard-remapping software - the trackpad stuff is just an added bonus.

Re:What about the trackpad?

[shunnicutt]

On my PowerBook, I always tap on the trackpad in order to click. I always use the tap-drag to drag. I never use the physical trackpad button.

I'd love to find a piece of software that recognized the physical trackpad button as a control-click, thus simulating a two-button mouse.

Re:What about the trackpad?

[addaon]

On the same note, I always thought it would be nice if, if apple is really going to stick with this one-button strategy, they made the touchpad touch-surface the whole size of the touchpad. That is, eliminate the button entirely, and just support tapping on a larger surface. And since apple uses touchpads with the same aspect ration as their monitors, it would make the touchpad significantly wider as well... bigger is better, when it comes to control surfaces, whether on airplanes or laptops.

Re:What about the trackpad?

[cjhuitt]

I've never looked inside the case of one of Apple's new laptops, but if you're good you should be able to wire something up so that by pressing the new button, the option key and the regular mouse click signals are both emitted. That would save the necessity of another mouse board, and would appear to the operating system to be the default "contextual menu" key/mouse combo.

There might be a bit of timing involved in this solution, however.

But...

[2nd Post!]

If you're using the mouse, you have one hand (at the most) on the keyboard and the other at the pad; index on the pad, thumb on the button, and let's say your left hand on the keyboard...

Immediately that means you have a five button mouse at your disposal:

Click
Shift-click
Ctrl-click
Option-click
Co mmand-click

Not to mention chords:
Shift-ctrl-click
Shift-command-click
Sh ift-option-click
etc, etc, etc.

So... why is the lack of a right mouse button (ctrl-click, but you know this already, right?) stopping you from using a PowerBook, other than the lack of cash? Is it just an academic excuse not to own a Powerbook? (Oh, it doesn't have a dedicated right mouse button!)?

ugh..

[Suppafly]

am i the only one that thinks splitting the space bar in half and making the left half of it into a backspace is a stupid idea. people learn to type on keyboards that have the space bar under either hand, its ignorant to assume that only the right hand will be used for space. backspace and space and totally different, its really annoying to be typeing along and delete the last character of every word you type and string all of your words together because some keyboard designer thought it would be cute to make half the space bar into a backspace key.. atleast make it a programable key so people can make it back into a space bar. if you make it just a backspace or delete key, its not really possible to remap it without messing up the backspace key that is in the proper location.

Ctrl key still retarded, I see

[TomatoMan]

Why on earth can't someone make a powerbook keyboard with the control key in the right place? I defy anybody to type a ctrl-a with their left hand, with the ctrl key one key to the RIGHT of the fn key in the corner, without either rotating their entire hand from the wrist, or inflicting major tendon damage. Don't even TRY ctrl-q.

Apple's own full-sized keyboards put the control key in the lower left corner where it belongs, although it should REALLY go where caps lock is. Why must they have it out of place on the powerbooks?

Yes, I know about the software mapping utilities such as uControl, which I use, but they all have quirks and have a nasty tendency to cause kernel panics on system upgrades. If someone comes up with a "programmers's keyboard," I've got a nice pile of money to throw at them.

Re:Ctrl key still retarded, I see

[Mr. Light Touch]

This is really a mute point with TouchStreams, since our modifier chords:

http://www.fingerworks.com/modifiers.html

for Shift, Ctrl, and Alt are much nicer than any pinky control key. And if you're an Emacs user, our Emacs mode automatically generates those crazy C-x C-f ... sequences from simple gestures.