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Stop Trying To 'Innovate' Keyboards, You're Just Making Them Worse
FuzzNugget writes "Peter Bright brings the hammer down on the increasing absurdities of laptop keyboard design, from the frustrating to the downright asinine, like the 'adaptive keyboard' of the new Lenovo X1 Carbon. He says, 'The X1's Adaptive Keyboard may have a superior layout to a regular keyboard (I don't think that it does, but for the sake of argument, let's pretend that it does), but that doesn't matter. As long as I have to use regular keyboard layouts too, the Adaptive Keyboard will be at a huge disadvantage. Every time I use another computer, I'll have to switch to the conventional layout. The standard layout has tremendous momentum behind it, and unless purveyors of new designs are able to engineer widespread industry support—as Microsoft did with the Windows keys, for example—then their innovations are doomed to being annoyances rather than improvements.' When will laptop manufacturers focus on perfecting a standardized design rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with every new generation?"
Anyone else find that you cannot get 16:10 laptops these days unless they're made by Apple?
Damn the "movie nerd" 16:9 ratio!
Too much "innovation" is appearance only, or the act of making gee-whiz gadgets that look like they might be far out. The clueless buying public falls for it every time.
Back in the 1990s, I used one of those Microsoft ergonomic keyboards for a little while... but then I learned that it was in fact putting more strain my hands. Back to the old tried-and-true 100-year-old typewriter style configuration.
Every time I've tried any kind of tricked out keyboard, the result has been the same. It doesn't work better than the original. For innovation to be actual innovation, it must solve a problem and do so in the context of reality, not merely be a nifty concept or look.
Futurist Traditionalism
The keyboard is a tool for the job... You seem to indicate that you know that by identifying as a touch-typist, but you also seem to be giving general advice as if this was a board for typists.
Slashdot is frequented by programmers, researchers, analysts, hardware hackers, web designers, students, PC gamers, and and all manner of geeks. Personally I have 4 different keyboards and I'm looking for more.
All rites reversed 2010
OK, the poster has a valid argument perhaps within the Slashdot community, whom in a given day, may traverse their hands across a dozen or more keyboards in their various tasks, but the argument to manufacturers falls completely flat.
Believe it or not fellow keyboard jockeys, the other 95% of the planet will buy a laptop...to use that laptop, pretty much exclusively, for the next 4-5 years. The average person does not know nor care about the day-to-day keyboard issues of the 5%.
To be honest, I'd rather see vendor variety. Backlight keys, increasingly intelligent designs and layouts, and even the return of the buckling-spring design have all come about through constant innovation.
Let me put this to you another way. Within your demands for a "standard" design, do you really want to subject the world to iKeyboard as the standard? Be careful what you ask for, for the 95% control your fate.
So then why didn't the Dvorak keyboard take hold? QWERTY was designed to keep keys on mechanical typewriters from jamming, Dvorak should be much faster.
What the corporate (and yes, some open source) dumbasses don't understand is that if you change my interface there's going to be a learning curve. For someone who has touch-typed for years, it would take years to get up to speed with Dvorak; TFA was right on the money IMO.
Unity, Windows 8, Lenovo and other keyboards... just stop already! Jesus, if they were designing cars you'd have a joystick instead of a wheel and the brake and gas pedals would be reversed (and have a hand-operated clutch).
I only want new if old is broken or new is demonstrably superior. Change for the sake of change is stupid and counterproductive.
Free Martian Whores!
Very few IT departments will let users install anything on "their" computers, which makes sense because otherwise you're going to have security problems.
It isn't my computer at work, it's my employer's. He pays me to use it.
Free Martian Whores!