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New Keyboard Technology
An anonymous reader sent in linkage to a story running on a few places about a
new customizable keyboard. It's a bit beyond anything you've probably seen before. Also
tom's has more.
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I always hear about these great keyboards, and I'd love to try one out, but they're never available in retail outlets like Circuit City or Masters Electronics. I always see your typical rectangular keyboard there, or those ergo keyboards. But never any of the really innovative ones like this! If they could get these sold in larger retail stores, then perhaps people would actually start transitioning to them. As long as I have to order them online, I won't buy them.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Now I can have my CTRL+ALT+DEL keys in range for easy access!
Picture 1
Picture 2
Quite neat concept.
Dephine URL
That thing looks painful to use. I have enough trouble with a normal keyboard layout, but there's really no point to putting keys anywhere but directly under your fingertips where you don't have to move to reach them.... which is exactly what the CLAW has solved:
http://www.claw.com.au/
(It's been out for 5 years now too)
eve though there re oly 25 kes it works gret
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
How exactly can they claim that this is ergonomic, when they leave the layout to users, who may know nothing about ergonomics, and thus, create joint-damaging layouts?
Seems obvious, really. If I want to switch to an APL or Dvorak keyboard (or in a multinational european environment, different people using the same computer have different national keyboard preferences), the glyphs on the keyboard should change!
Combined with repositionable keys like the subject of this story, that would be pretty interesting.
I bought an Ergodex keyboard exclusively for gaming a few months ago. It took them 4 weeks to fill the order -- apparently, they haven't been able to scale large enough to distribute through the retail chains.
Being able to move the keys around is just one of many features that make the Ergodex valuable to me. You can also program complex macros and key-chords to a single keystroke on the fly. You can fine tune the timing of the individual keystrokes to the millisecond.
Right now I have my Ergodex set up for World of Warcraft. Anyone who has a few high level characters in the game know how quickly you fill up your toolbars with hotkeys and macros. The ergodex allows me to have an extra couple rows of hotkeys placed exactly where I want them. It also lets me chain precicely timed combos in a way that WoW's UI won't let you do at all.
The Ergodex will store profiles for different programs and automatically switch to that profile when you run the program as well. The buttons have great tactile feedback, and when you anchor them on the Ergodex they do not shift or wiggle one bit. You can also buy extra keys and an extra clear transparent keytray so that you can swap out entire sets.
At $150, it's not cheap. But considering that i've spent $400 for my graphics card that I'll end up replacing in 2 years, I expect to get a lot more bang for my buck with this upgrade. I wouldn't consider gaming without one now.
I love my Model M. If you want new buckling spring boards, the place to get them is pckeyboard.com (which was actually linked in that wikipedia article). Not only do they have many ayouts (some with a windows key or even an integrated trackball or one of those nipples that is on the thinkpad), but they do custom builds.