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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!
The worst keyboard I ever used was the Logitech MX5500. Poor design all over - it was clear that whoever designed it was focussing on ideas that sounded nice, but were ergonomically unfeasible. Stupid things like putting keys underneath the keypad such that pressing them from a natural posture caused cramps, or removing the numlock key and replacing it with some calculator function integrated with the LCD display. Perhaps they forgot that computers powerful calculators in of themselves? The list went on - I wrote an eight page engineering design critique (I teach college mechatronic design) and sent it to them. The logitech PR person who answered it said they'd send it on to the design office. From what's come out of there since, I'm sure they just sent it straight to trash. :P
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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Many Europeans are already used to using different keyboards at different times. As we speak I'm typing on a Danish-layout keyboard remapped to US-English. Which is... almost like US-English, except that the Enter key is vertical rather than horizontal, so \| is located to the left of enter rather than above it (can't remap the physical shape of the keys...). Oh, and `~ is to the left of Z. Sometimes I use a UK keyboard, which is somewhat different yet again.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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 "Windows key" location existed before on other systems, it was called the "meta" key. Apple had the Apple logo in that place, Sun keyboards had the diamond logo, even the Symbolics machines had the key well before Microsoft even talked about ripping off DOS.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I would pay a lot of money for a backlit, Microsoft Natural style keyboard. Googling indicates I'm not alone. I don't care about gaming, but when I walk into my home office at night and sit down, I want to see where all the keys are. And I'm used to the Microsoft Natural keyboard shape from many years of exclusive use.
You getting this, Microsoft / clone manufacturers?
Take a look at
http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/concept/
http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/tactus/
and other things from this family.
This is an _adaptive keyboard_.
Yes, it is plain horrible for coding or text editing, but idea behind it is to support some more niche programs for video/photo editing, 3d modelling etc, with keyboard changing icons on keys depending in which mode are.
Input devices are the most important part of any computer, yet we don't worry about keyboards/mice on desktops, because we know we can swap them with something we prefer, at will. With laptops, we're stuck with the cheap junk that's included. And worse, we're stuck with the economics laptop makers are under, and we don't want to pay $500 extra for a high-end laptop, just to get a $20 keyboard we like.
If laptop makers standardized on a few sizes of keyboard, and made them easy to slide in and out and swap with a different model, life would be good...
It's POSSIBLE for laptop makers to get it right and include a great keyboard with their laptops. There are innumerable awesome small keyboards out there. In fact, I use nothing but ultra compact keyboards for my home computers, because the ergonomics of super-flat are best, and the lack of a keypad on the side makes reaching over for the mouse vastly quicker and easier. To make an awesome laptop, start with a keyboard like this one: http://typematrix.com/
But the odds of them doing that are far too slim, and there's just too little incentive to ever expect it to happen. The input market is far too specialized. Instead, just make the parts interchangeable, and not only will your core customers be happy with their input options even on the cheapest laptops, but your products will also sell better to non-English speakers, who want a very different keyboard.
It's long overdue.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
As a Linux user it's sometimes necessary to cleanly reboot the machine through the Kernel call Alt+PrintScreen+ REISUB, I don't see how to do that on this laptop?
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.
The only thing I would ever want from a laptop is a keyboard that's in the ergonomic 'split' style. Yes that would be butt-ugly and probably make the laptop itself the size of an elementary school desk, but with RSI issues I can't type on a standard keyboard for very long. Yes you can plug a standard ergo USB keyboard into a laptop, but that setup requires a desk as it is too big for my lap. Since I'm desk bound with that, I just use the desktop computer I already have.
Meanwhile, I'm noticing that decent ergo kbs are getting scarce for desktops too. Back 10 or 15 years ago there were dozens of brands and all of them cheap and good, now there are only 2 or 3 to chose from with crappy key layouts and they last about a year or so.
do() || do_not();
I agree, the ever changing keyboard layout is frustrating. The worst ever offender is macbook keyboards where they made the power button a keyboard button (and in the worst place, where a 'del' or 'backspace' button should be).
However, the keyboard linked in the article actually has some nice ideas, for example replacing the totally useless caps lock with 'home' and 'end'. It would be a great keyboard for programmers.
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I have been remapping caps lock to ctrl for years, and it's really nice. Having it (capslock/ctrl) be replaced by home/end would be a disaster for me.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
A keyboard should be sturdy enough to beat a man to death with. And then use to write his obituary.
Have gnu, will travel.
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!
So then why didn't the Dvorak keyboard take hold? QWERTY was designed to keep keys on mechanical typewriters from jamming,
When will people get their facts straight? QWERTYdid not prevent jamming by making people type slower. They prevented jamming by arranging keys in a way that you are very rarely pressing keys next to each other. Which means the strikers are less likely to collide.
When will people get their facts straight? QWERTYdid not prevent jamming by making people type slower.
The post you replied to didn't claim that it did. Why do I get the feeling that you were just looking for a place to "correct" somebody about the QWERTY layout, and this was the best place that you could find?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I've been using the Truly Ergonomic ( https://www.trulyergonomic.com/ ) keyborad for well over a year now. It's totally different from a normal keyboard. I'm also using a blank-keycap one, in dvorak mode, with some personal key-changes.
I love it being different. I love the way that it's different -- columnar arrangement, tab, backspace, enter down the middle, home-row shifts, delete mirroring escape.
It took a whopping two weeks to get used to the new layout. Much like it took me two weeks to switch from qwerty to dvorak fifteen years ago. And I've no trouble bouncing back and forth to "normal" keyboards when necessary.
More important that how I feel, is how I feel. My fingers move a lot less, I type much more fluidly, I'm much more comfortable, and long days feel the same as short days.
I welcome new designs and layouts. You're not forced to use the ones that you don't like. Which is good, because otherwise I'd be forced to use a qwerty keyboard -- you know, the one designed to be horrible to use. The author might want to focus on that problem first.
That is interesting. I have had the opposite experience. When you say "in fact" did you mean that you read some study or got doctor's advice indicating that the strain was increased by switching to ergo? Or was that just your experience?
Rudeness isn't productive. Misunderstandings are common in an online format, where would all of us be if everyone reacted the way you did? Well, I will take a lesson and try to phrase better in the future. But in this case if I had, I would have missed out on the useful data that you're a dickhead.
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As someone who moved to Dvorak after 5 years of touch-typing Qwerty, I can tell you that this is not the case. A lot of the effort of learning to touch-type is in the motor/coordination skills in the fingers, not in memorizing which letter goes where. I think it took me about a month to get up to speed in Dvorak; it didn't help that I was recovering from a rather painful RSI at the time. I ended up being faster on Dvorak than I ever was on Qwerty.
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Probably because I modified the original phrasing and failed to update the article preceding it.
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